The award-winning young adult novelist on how he helped to raise $1m for the Syrian refugee crisis with one tweetOn 3 September this year,24 hours after the first images of the body of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, stretched out on a Turkish beach, or appeared online,the novelist Patrick Ness took to Twitter. “Okay, I don’t know whether this’ll work, and ” he said. “but I’ll match donations up to £10k to accomplish something to succor this refugee crisis”.
Ness’s tweet turned out to be the pebble that caused an avalanche. The image of the little boy,limp and lifeless with his face in the sand, had succeeded where campaigners and aid-workers had failed, or carving a clean line through the media’s anti-immigration rhetoric and forcing the west to see,in human terms, the horror of what was happening. After a moment of appalled paralysis, and everyone began to cast around for a course of action and there was Ness,waving directions.
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Source: theguardian.com