‘A feeling of total freedom’: Valeria Luiselli welcomes chance to lock her fiction away in the Future Library
Author Valeria Luiselli’s next manuscript will remain a secret – sealed, unpublished and unread – until the year 2114.
The Mexican author, whose books include The Story of My Teeth and Lost Children Archive, has been selected as the 10th author to contribute to the Future Library, a project run by artist Katie Paterson which invites acclaimed writers to submit new work to be stored away for decades.
Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong and Tsitsi Dangarembga are among the authors who have contributed to the project so far. All the works will be published in an anthology in 2114, 100 years after the project began in 2014.
Luiselli told the Guardian that she was “moved” by the invitation to contribute, and “very interested” in how the project “reshapes or forces me to rearticulate my relationship to writing”.
Born in Mexico City, she grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. Her five books include the Bookernominated novel Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, which won the American book award in 2018. The following year she was awarded a MacArthur fellowship, also known as a “genius grant”.
The writer was already familiar with Paterson’s work when she received the invitation; she had found the artist’s audio recordings of a melting glacier “beautiful”. She later came across Paterson’s map documenting the locations of dead stars. “All of her work seems to speak so thoughtfully about our relationship to time, and time at a scale that is unreachable to us in some way or the other,” Luiselli said.
Each year, the contributing author passes their work to Paterson at a handover ceremony in Oslo’s Nordmarka forest, where 1,000 trees were planted as part of the project. In 2114, the anthology will be printed on paper from those trees.
Luiselli said that the project brings a “feeling of total freedom”. “This is a piece that no one I know will read – maybe my baby daughter, because she’s two, and she would be 93 – so it could be. But other than her, I don’t know anyone that would read it. So there’s a freedom in that.
“But then at the same time as freedom, there is an enormous responsibility, because it feels like a piece of archive of the past, which is my present, that will be trying to speak to what is now for me the future, and I would like that future archive to be meaningful, to say something of right now to the people then. How to do that responsibly is important to me. So this coexistence of a sense of freedom and responsibility is one that I’m really interested in exploring as I move through the piece.”
Luiselli’s text will be stored with the others in a specially designed room in the Deichman Bjørvika public library in Oslo, which was built using trees that were cut down in Nordmarka forest before the new seedlings were planted.
“Blending fiction and nonfiction, Valeria Luiselli’s work explores themes of identity, migration and the permeability of geographic borders,” said Paterson. “Through compelling storytelling, she explores humanitarian crises such as the diaspora of children seeking asylum, posing profound questions on displacement and belonging. Luiselli’s work is a cry for compassion and empathy, and we welcome her to Future Library for our milestone 10th year.”
Luiselli “always” writes by hand before typing up her work on a computer, and she asked the Future Library team if she could turn in a handwritten work, to which they said yes. “I’m looking forward to working on a manuscript without a feeling of ‘final version’ that the computer gives me,” said the writer.
Alongside Luiselli, Atwood, Vuong and Dangarembga, the other authors who have contributed works so far are David Mitchell, Sjón, Elif Shafak, Han Kang, Karl Ove Knausgård, and Judith Schalansky.
Looking forward, Luiselli is keenly aware of the world’s “fragility” – “it is so clear that things can fall apart” – but she said she feels a “responsibility in hope”. “I feel like it’s a very political thing to hope. It forces us to look forward and imagine a livable world, a possible world, even maybe a beautiful world, and then gear our actions towards that.”
“I would like to write from a space of hope and desire and imagination,” she said. “It’s just a more fertile ground.”