Deadline: Sept 15, 2025
Contact: Jenna Coughlin, Associate Professor, St. Olaf College
Email: coughl3@stolaf.edu

Future Library (2014-2114, https://www.futurelibrary.no/), a public artwork conceived by Scottish artist Katie Paterson and supported by the City of Oslo, Norway, spans a century and comprises multiple sites. In a clearing in Nordmarka forest, 1000 spruce trees are growing to provide the paper for an archive of texts by authors chosen each year. Designated to remain unpublished and unread until 2114, they are housed in the “Silent Room” in Oslo’s Deichman Bjørvika, a meditative space with undulating walls created from trees removed from the clearing.

Conceptually, Future Library has evolved over the last decade. Its original themes, “imagination and time,” evoked questions such as whether books and languages would exist through 2114. More recently, as Paterson said in January 2025, questions turn to “the extinction crisis and whether there will be anyone left to read the books,” or if there will even be forests.

This collection, the first academic volume devoted to the subject, will explore such timely and poignant questions: about the powers of imagination and memory, the deep future, the changing environment, and relations between nonhuman and human life. Also, we invite chapters focused on the authors selected thus far, and how their bodies of work support and amplify the dimensions and impact of the artwork (such as Margaret Atwood, Han Kang, Ocean Vuong, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Tommy Orange, to name a few).

Deadlines: To express interest and request the full call for papers, please contact Linda Badley (lbadley@comcast.net), Jenna Coughlin (coughl3@stolaf.edu), or Gitte Mose (gitte.mose@iln.uio.no) by August 30, 2025. Abstracts (300-400 words) and a short bio are due September 15th, first drafts by March 30, 2026, and final drafts by October 31, 2026.

Posted on June 3, 2025