First the pop stars sang for aid to Africa, and now an illustrious group of authors are helping victims of Aids in the continent. Twenty-one writers, including five Nobel prize winners, have produced an anthology to raise money for a charity helping those with Aids and HIV in southern Africa.
Telling Tales, a collection of short stories by Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, Susan Sontag, Woody Allen, John Updike and 15 others, will be launched at the United Nations headquarters in New York by Kofi Annan tomorrow, before World Aids Day.
The book was the brainchild of the Booker prize winning author Nadine Gordimer after it struck her that writers should follow the example of musicians, who have rerecorded Do They Know It's Christmas and have also been active in supporting Aids causes across Africa.
"I became very conscious of the fact that musicians and singers were having concert performances in aid of Aids and HIV victims, and I thought, 'What are writers doing?'" she said from her home in South Africa.
"There has been no gesture from writers themselves to show they are human beings and have social responsibilities too."
Gordimer wrote to an international list of 20 of her favourite authors and asked them to donate a story to the cause. To her surprise, every one, including Arthur Miller, Amos Oz, Günter Grass and Chinua Achebe, agreed.
Gordimer, a Nobel prize winner, edited the anthology and then persuaded the 11 publishers involved to waive royalties. All profits from the sale of the book will go to Treatment Action Campaign, which tackles HIV and Aids in southern Africa, the worst-hit region in the world.
Gordimer, the author of The Lying Days and The Conservationist, said she simply asked for stories about "anything in the vast range of human experience" which people would want to read and buy as a Christmas present for their friends and family. She laid down no rules for the authors but only stipulated that they should not submit work on the subject of Aids.
"I did not want anything about HIV/Aids. There are enough documents already giving us all the facts and figures," she said. "I hope the world is going to tackle this pandemic. One of the points the book makes quietly is that it is a pandemic.
"The writers come from all these different countries, many of which have the idea that Aids isn't their problem.
"There is a tendency in the west to think Aids is only really in Africa and doesn't affect us personally. This isn't true. Everyone travels all over the world now, and this awful disease travels with us."
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