Top authors to auction character names for torture survivor charity

Fancy appearing in a Margaret Atwood novel? Or perhaps playing a pivotal role in Ian McEwan’s next endeavour?

Seventeen authors, including Atwood, McEwan, Julian Barnes, Zadie Smith and Will Self, are selling naming rights to characters in upcoming works next month, in a charity auction in London.

Money raised from the sale, suitably dubbed the Immortality Auction, will go to Freedom from Torture, a charity that provides therapies and support to torture survivors.

As a patron for Freedom from Torture, English author Julian Barnes was the first to donate a character in an upcoming, unnamed short story. He was followed by a prestigious list of international authors, consisting of Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Alan Hollinghurst, Joanna Trollope, Martina Cole, Sebastian Faulks, Robert Harris, Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureishi, Ken Follett, Will Self, Kathy Lette, Adam Mars-Jones, Adam Foulds, Pat Barker and Tracy Chevalier.

Chevalier, famous for her novel Girl With a Pearl Earring, is offering a female reader a chance to be immortalised as a landlady in her next, as-yet-unnamed book. “I am holding open a place in my new novel for Mrs— ideally a Mrs—[your surname], tough-talking landlady of a boarding house in 1850s Gold Rush-era San Francisco,” she said. “The first thing she says to the hero is: ‘No sick on my stairs. You vomit on my floors, you’re out.’”

Thriller writer Robert Harris is offering a spot in “a future novel”, while Atwood is offering a choice to bidders: the chance to appear in the novel she is currently working on, or to pop up in her retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, to be published as part of Vintage Books’s Hogarth Shakespeare programme in 2016.

Pat Barker said her winning bidder will get to name a character in her upcoming novel, Noonday, which she revealed will come out in 2015. “Adding the character or changing the name of an existing character will probably be the last thing I do to the book, and I’ll do that as soon as I know the name,” she said.

Barnes, who is currently finishing a full-length novel and has not started the short story, said: “The point of the Immortality Auction is to raise money while giving pleasure. We hope it will intrigue to name a character after yourself – or a friend – and see what happens when you turn that name over to a novelist or short-story writer.”

“There is no guarantee of the named character resembling you, but a pretty good chance that he or she will turn out sympathetic,” he continued. “Unless, of course, you’d like it otherwise; in which case you are allowed to specify - though no promises can be made!”

Freedom from Torture has successfully raised money by offering spots in novels before: in 2000 the charity, then known as the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, raised £25,000 by auctioning off spots in books by high profile authors including participants of this year’s auction, Kathy Lette, Sebastian Faulks and Hanif Kureishi. That year, some authors refused to offer a character: crime writer and patron of the charity Ruth Rendell told organisers she “loathed” the idea of the auction but later donated £10,000; and other authors, including Martin Amis, declined to take part, saying names were too crucial to change in their novels.

But it helped the creative process for some: after placing the highest bid of the entire auction – £6,200 – Shelaine Green went on to become the main character of Kathy Lette’s 2003 romantic comedy, Dead Sexy.

In the 2004 auction, Luke Squires placed a winning bid and later appeared as “a sexually precocious schoolboy” in Adam Mars-Jones’s 2008 novel, Pilcrow. Mars-Jones, offering another character this year, said Squire’s winning bid was “about as much as two months’ subscription to a gym... which is a rather more laborious way of aspiring to eternal life.”

While the auction has some big name donors, it is not the first time authors have relinquished naming rights for charity: in 2005, eBay hosted a charity auction offering the chance to buy the right to name characters in books by authors including Stephen King, John Grisham, Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon. The winner of King’s auction paid US $25,100 to name a character after her little brother: zombie killer Ray Huizenga later played a vital role in King’s 2006 novel Cell.

More recently, two fans paid £20,000 each to be slaughtered by George RR Martin, in upcoming books in his bloody Game of Thrones saga, with the money split between a wolf sanctuary and a food charity in North Mexico.

Tickets are currently on sale for the Immortality Auction, which will be held at the Royal Institution of Great Britain on November 20. Readers who are unable to attend can submit bids online from November 5 until the day of the auction.