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World renown writers benefit Aids victims
Nadine Gordimer has edited a collection of stories by world renown writers as a project to raise funds for victims of HIV/Aids. The 21 stories which make up Telling Tales are not about HIV/Aids, but the "pleasure of reading them will help succour and support its victims", said Gordimer
The writers in the collection include Chinua Achebe, Woody Allen, Margaret Atwood, Nadine Gordimer, Gunter Grass, Hanif Kureishi,, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Arthur Miller, Eskia Mphahlele, Njabulo Ndebele, Kenzaburo Oë, Salman Rushdie José Saramago and Susan Sontag. The list of writers includes at least four Nobel prize winners.
The book is available from November 1 in the UK and USA. A launch for the book, to be attended by Gordimer, is to be held in Johannesburg on November 20. Kofi Annan will launch the book at the United Nations in New York on November 30.
The writers in Telling Tales have given their stories without any fee of royalty and the publishers of each edition where it is to be released have produced the book without receiving any profit. Proceeds will go to organizations helping people living with the disease in whichever country the anthology is published and sold.
"I have been concerned for some time by the lack of any group action among writers to raise funds for the battle against HIV/AIDS," said Gordimer, who is Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Development Programme. "The disease is rampant on the African continent… but no country, no individual and no life style is safe," she pointed out.
"With a few writer friends I discussed the idea of our doing something on a scale within our abilities and the level of attention writers can expect to be associated with their work," she said.
Rarely have world writers of such variety and distinctions appeared together in an anthology, she said. "Their stories capture the range of emotions and situations of our human universe – tragedy, comedy, fantasy, satire, dramas of sexual love and of war, in different continents and cultures."
The stories have been chosen by the writers themselves as representing some of the best of their lifetime work as story tellers. The stories capture the range of emotions and situation of our human universe: tragedy, comedy, fantasy, satire, dramas of sexual love and of war, in different continents and cultures, according to the cover blurb.
