Imagine being a character in a bestselling novel by your favourite author; your name forever in print so you can become figuratively immortal just like your favourite fictional characters.
This is now a possibility, as some of the biggest names in literature are giving fans a chance to live forever by being named as a character in their upcoming novels, if they bid in the Freedom from Torture Immortality Auction.
Authors including Michael Morpurgo, Ian McEwan, Phillip Pullman, Tracy Chevalier, Jonathan Coe and Maggie O’Farrell are working with the human rights charity, Freedom from Torture, and have agreed to award auction winners with the promise that their name will be incorporated into their next book. Just think, you could be the love interest in the next Atonement, or be the hero of the next best children’s story by Michael Morpurgo.
Tracy Chevalier, bestselling author of At the Edge of the Orchard and Girl With a Pearl Earring, is one author involved in this project, and is planning a story that will be set in a Winchester Cathedral during the 1930s. She says, ‘If you are a man, you will be a bell ringer there; if a woman you will embroider cushions and kneelers that can still be seen today in the Cathedral choir stalls’.
Critically acclaimed novelist Maggie O’Farrell hasn’t started her next novel but is going to take inspiration from a name. She says, ‘I am looking forward to meeting this new character’.
It gets better, as Linda Grant, author of The Clothes on Their Backs says, ‘I have so many false starts I couldn’t say what I'd write next, but having a name would certainly be a start, and I might base the whole thing around you’.
Writer and Booker prize winner Ian McEwan hightlights the importance of the cause. He says, ‘This auction offers the genuine opportunity of an afterlife. More importantly, bidding in the Freedom from Torture auction will help support a crucial and noble cause. The rehabilitation of torture survivors cannot be accomplished without expertise, compassion, time – and your money’.
The charity Freedom from Torture is directed towards helping torture survivors who seek refuge in the UK process trauma through therapy, legal and welfare support, and a creative writing group called Write to Life. It aims to shine a light on torture and its consequences, and works to hold torturing states to account.
The live auction will take place on 17th November and will be hosted by comedian and author Alexei Sayle. Tickets are available here, and those who wish to bid but won’t be able to attend can place bids online from 3rd November.
We’re totally hooked. Although we’re not sure our names are roll-off-the-tongue, hero types, we’d love to have a fictional afterlife.