Laurie Anderson Joins Oslo's Future Library — Her Work Sealed Until 2114
Laurie Anderson has been chosen as the 13th contributor to Oslo's Future Library project. Her manuscript will be sealed and unreadable until 2114 — a wait of 88 years from now. The selection places one of the most versatile figures in contemporary American art into a century-spanning public artwork that has quietly built one of the most distinguished rosters in global letters. The Guardian
The Future Library, conceived by Scottish artist Katie Paterson, works on a simple but striking premise. In 2014, Paterson planted 1,000 spruce trees in Nordmarka, the forested hills north of Oslo. Each year, a new contributor submits an original manuscript. Those texts are stored in a purpose-built silent room within the Deichman Bjørvika public library. No one reads them. When the project concludes in 2114, the accumulated anthology will be printed on paper made from the felled trees of that forest — the physical pages of the books literally grown alongside the work they carry. Paterson, born in 1981, has exhibited at the Hayward Gallery, Tate Britain, the Guggenheim Museum New York, MCA Sydney, Kunsthalle Wien, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Future Library; The Guardian
The Future Library Trust, which oversees the selection process, cited Anderson's "singular ability to speak across time, creating work that is profoundly human, radically imaginative and alive to futures we cannot yet foresee." The Guardian
The trustees responsible for that selection include Paterson herself, Simon Prosser (Publishing Director of Hamish Hamilton), Liv Sæteren (former Director of the Deichmanske Bibliotek), Ingeri Engelstad (Publishing Director at Oktober Press), Håkon Harket (Publishing Director of Forlaget Press), and Anne Beate Hovind (Project Director of Bjørvika Utvikling and Chair of the Trust). Their mandate is to select and invite the authors and to sustain the artwork for its full hundred-year duration — a governance structure that must itself survive a century of institutional drift, political turnover, and technological change. Future Library
Anderson brings a career that resists easy categorization. She is a writer, director, composer, visual artist, musician, and vocalist. She has published 10 books, been nominated for six Grammy Awards (winning one), and received a lifetime achievement award in 2024. Earlier this year, she was named the 2026 Kyoto Prize laureate in Arts and Philosophy. The Guardian; Facebook
Her engagement with libraries as artistic and civic spaces is not new. Brooklyn Public Library commissioned her to present a Message from the Library installation, and the Library Foundation of Los Angeles scheduled two ALOUD programs with her at the Central Library. Brooklyn Public Library; LFLA
The contributors preceding Anderson read as a curated survey of contemporary world literature: Margaret Atwood, Han Kang, Ocean Vuong, David Mitchell, Sjón, Elif Shafak, Karl Ove Knausgård, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Judith Schalansky, and Valeria Luiselli. Each has deposited a text that will remain unseen in the silent room at Deichman Bjørvika, accumulating as a body of work whose totality cannot be assessed by anyone now living. The Guardian
Anderson said she hopes to write something useful about love for readers in 2114. The Guardian
The broader context here is less about any single manuscript than about the architecture of patience the project imposes. The Future Library asks contributors to write for an audience that does not yet exist and cannot reply. It asks a trust to maintain institutional coherence across a span longer than most organizations survive. And it asks a forest to grow at a rate calibrated to produce, in 100 years, enough paper for an anthology whose contents were locked away one by one, year by year, in a room designed for silence. The wager is that the material infrastructure — trees, library, trust, room — will outlast the cultural conditions that produced it. Whether it will is, by design, unknowable to anyone submitting a text today.
Anderson's selection extends the project's pattern of reaching beyond conventional literary categories. Paterson's earliest contributors were predominantly novelists and poets; the later roster has widened to include essayists and artists whose practice spans disciplines. Anderson's appointment continues that trajectory, bringing a body of work rooted in performance, sound, and multimedia experimentation into an archive defined by the printed page. The tension between her practice and the project's eventual medium — ink on paper from trees planted a century earlier — is itself part of what the selection produces. Her manuscript, whatever form it takes, will sit in the silent room alongside novels and essays by authors whose reputations may or may not survive the interval, waiting for a readership that will judge them all at once.
