Writer and editor Sohini Basak grew up in Barrackpore and studied literature and creative writing at the universities of Delhi, Warwick, and East Anglia, where she was awarded the Malcolm Bradbury Continuation Grant for Poetry. She is the author of the poetry collection We Live in the Newness of Small Differences, which won the inaugural Beverly International Manuscript Prize in 2017.
For this episode of BOL, Basak reads her poem Future Library: Some Anxieties, the first in a three-part series of poems.
The “Future Library” poems were triggered by Katie Paterson’s astonishing public art project (Framitidsbiblioteke in the Norwegian), which involves tending to 1000 spruce trees that were planted in 2014 outside Oslo, to create and curate a library for the future. For the next 100 years, one writer will be contributing a text to the library every year, and these unread manuscripts will be held in secrecy until 2114 when they will be printed with the paper supplied by the spruce forest. Paterson’s artwork is an experiment to see if text produced in the present will find receptive readers in the unknown future.
