Popular Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood ‘s most recent work is Scribbler Moon but it cannot be read for another 100 years.
The Booker prize-winning writer recently visited Oslo’s Nordmarka forest to present the boxed manuscript of Scribbler Moon amidst 1,000 newly planted pine trees.
According to The Guardian, the author has worked on the new novel in absolute secrecy during the past year. The forest she visited contain the young trees which will be harvested to make the paper her work will be printed on in a century’s time.
Over the next 100 years, a further 99 authors – one a year – will contribute a text to the so-called Future Library, an unusual project dreamed up by Scottish conceptual artist Katie Paterson. Britain’s David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, has recently been announced as 2015’s writer. In 2114, the 1,000 trees planted last summer in the Nordmarka will be chopped down and all the texts made public.
“There’s something magical about it,” says Atwood. “It’s like Sleeping Beauty. The texts are going to slumber for 100 years and then they’ll wake up, come to life again. It’s a fairytale length of time. She slept for 100 years.”
There were certain rules to observe. “it could be any length, one word or 1,000 pages, a story, a novel, poems, non-fiction,” revealed Atwood. The plan is to print 3,000 copies of all of the texts once the collection is completed. Nearly 100 have already been sold at £600 each (846 euro equivalent.) The manuscripts are to be housed in Oslo Library in a special wood-lined Future Library.
The Guardian quotes David Mitchell's view of the concept as “a vote of confidence that, despite the catastrophist shadows under which we live, the future will still be a brightish place willing and able to complete an artistic endeavour begun by long-dead people a century ago”.
Margaret Atwood won the Booker Prize for the first time in 2000 with The Blind Assassin but has been shortlisted for the prize three times. In 1986 she was short-listed for The Handmaid’s Tale, in 1996 for Alias Grace an in 2003 for her eleventh novel, Oryx and Crake. She was born in 1939 in Ottawa.
