Salman Rushdie and other award winning authors launch book sale fundraiser to help Syrian refugees

The literary world has finally woken up to the reality of the refugee crisis after the award-winning author Patrick Ness wrote on Twitter earlier this month that, “tired of just tweeting my despair about the current refugee crisis that the UK government is responding to with inhumane feebleness” donating about £100, 000 (30 million Naira)

The tweet was a hit, and a host of UK’s bestselling authors are coming together to raise money for Syrian refugees, as writers including Hilary Mantel, Salman Rushdie and David Nicholls sign up to forgo earnings from their best-selling books to raise £1m.

From Thursday, whenever one of their donated books is sold, Waterstones will give the full retail price to Oxfam’s Syria crisis appeal. Titles including the Booker winners Wolf Hall and Midnight’s Children, David Nicholls’s huge bestseller One Day, Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book will not earn a penny for authors, publishers or the bookselling chain.

Other writers include the famous Philip Pullman, David Walliams, Marian Keyes, Victoria Hislop, Ali Smith, Robert Harris, Lee Child, Caitlin Moran, Julia Donaldson and Jacqueline Wilson.

These authors have, via their publishers, given between one and two thousand copies of one of their top-selling titles to Waterstones, with the donated stock worth a total of £1m.

The book chain will put the sticker “Buy Books for Syria” on the books from Thursday.

“Everyone is forgoing profits – nobody is deducting a penny anywhere, including the distributors and the warehouses, who are doing it for free,” said James Daunt, Waterstones managing director told Guardian UK

Other authors donating titles include Mark Haddon, William Boyd, Bill Bryson, Tracy Chevalier, Khaled Hosseini, Alexandra McCall Smith, Michael Morpurgo, JoJo Moyes, Ian Rankin and Mary Beard.

The book industry has already raised over half a million pounds to help Syrian refugees after the award-winning author Patrick Ness tweet.

Even authors including John Green, Pullman, Nicholls, Keyes and Anthony Horowitz, and some publishers have joined in.

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It is hoped that these honest efforts would go a long way to help the refugees.