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Ox Tales refers to four collections of short stories written by 38 UK based authors. The books and stories are loosely based around the four elements (Earth, Fire, Air and Water).

The Ox Tales books were released in order to raise awareness for Oxfam’s role as a second-hand bookseller and raise money for Oxfam’s projects. All the authors contributed their stories free of charge, so a large proportion of the cost of the books goes to Oxfam (£3.50 per book if bought directly from Oxfam ).

Themes
The themes of the collections are intended to represent four aspects of Oxfam’s work:

Earth – land rights and farming

Air – combating climate change

Fire – campaigning for arms control

Water – safe water and sanitation

Each book contains a poem by Vikram Seth and an afterword, written by Oxfam, detailing their work in that area.

Authors
38 British and Irish based authors contributed to this project.

Earth:

Rose Tremain, Jonathan Coe, Marti Leimbach, Kate Atkinson, Ian Rankin, Marina Lewycka, Hanif Kureishi, Jonathan Buckley, Nicholas Shakespeare, Vikram Seth

Air:

Alexander McCall Smith, Helen Simpson, DBC Pierre, AL Kennedy, Kamila Shamsie, Beryl Bainbridge, Louise Welsh, Diran Adebayo, Helen Fielding, Vikram Seth

Water:

Esther Freud, David Park, Hari Kunzu, Zoe Heller, Michel Faber, William Boyd, Giles foden, Michael Morpurgo, Vikram Seth

Fire:

Mark Haddon, Geoff Dyer, Victoria Hislop, Sebastian Faulks John Le Carre, Xiaoulu Guo, William Sutcliffe, Ali Smith, Lionel Shriver, Jeanette Winterson, Joanna Trollope, Vikram Seth

Composition and Publication
All four books were published by Green Profile (a section of Profile Books ) on 2nd July 2009. They were originally published as part of Oxfam’s Bookfest (4th-18th July 2009).

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