UNITED NATIONS, Nov 30 (AFP) - Nobel prize-winning novelist Nadine Gordimer launched Tuesday a literary-style Live Aid, with a short-story collection by some of world's most distinguished writers to benefit HIV/AIDS treatment.
At a press conference, where she was introduced by Salman Rushdie as "the Bob Geldof of the literary world," Gordimer said she had taken her cue from musicians who had performed benefit concerts for causes like AIDS and famine relief.
"I asked myself, what had we writers done?" the South African novelist said. "The answer was nothing. No group effort."
Geldof organized musicians behind the 1985 Live Aid concerts, which raised funds for Ethiopian famine victims.
Gordimer wrote to 20 novelists, including four fellow Nobel prize winners -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gunter Grass, Jose Saramago and Kenzaburo Oe -- asking each to contribute one short story and to waive all royalties.
"And I got wonderful responses from every one of them," she said.
The result was a 21-story collection, "Telling Tales," which has so far found 13 publishers around the world -- all of whom agreed to distribute the book without taking any profit.
"It's a great book. Some of the stories are real classics," said Rushdie, who was also among the invited contributors, along with the likes of John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Woody Allen, Michel Tournier and Arthur Miller.
Specifically, the money generated from the worldwide sales of "Telling Tales" will finance the work of the Treatment Action Campaign, a South African HIV/AIDS treatment non-governmental organisation.
"Musicians have contributed their talents to jazz, pop and classical concerts for the benefit of the 40 million men, women and children worldwide infected with HIV/AIDS, two-thirds of whom are in Africa," Gordimer, who edited the collection, said in the introduction to the book.
"We decided that we too should ... give something of our ability, as imaginative writers, to contribute in our way to the fight against this disease from which no country and no individual is safely isolated," she said.
None of the stories take HIV/AIDS as their direct subject, but many deal with themes of death, illness and isolation.
Updike, who attended Tuesday's launch, said he had jumped at the chance to join the project.
"Unlike rock stars, writers tend to live small and private lives," he said, adding that it was only right that they "put, in a small way, their names on the line."
With all profits from the book going toward AIDS treatment, Rushdie acknowledged there was also a crucial campaigning job to be done to dispel "the pervasive misconceptions" that still surround the illness.
"The great enemy here is indifference," agreed Gordimer. "The denial that this can happen to me, the feeling that it belongs to the gay community, or black people or undeveloped countries."
The book was launched on the eve of World AIDS Day and coincided with a dire new warning from the head of the UN AIDS program, Peter Piot, about the deepening global crisis posed by the disease.
Piot said the number of HIV infections in China, India and Russia was on the verge of exploding and could lead to tens of millions of new cases and threaten the stability of the world economy.
"There is something new and ominous in the course of this epidemic," Piot told reporters in Washington. "When the very act essential to furthering the human race also threatens it, then we are in a very dangerous place."
World AIDS Day this year is focussing on the alarming rise of infections among women and girls.
Of the 39.4 million people infected today, 47 percent are female, a rise from 41 percent in 1997, according to UNAIDS.
The situation is catastrophic in sub-Saharan Africa, where 57 percent of HIV/AIDS cases are female. In Africa's 15-24 age group, it is 76 percent.
"AIDS is the great moral challenge of our time and we are clearly at a crossroads of the global fight," Piot said. "The choices we make today will define generations to come."
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