Ariana Grande to return to Manchester to perform benefit concert

Couples comfort one another as flowers and balloons are left in Saint Ann's Square in tribute to those killed in an explosion at the Manchester Arena earlier this week (Getty Images)

Ariana Grande has promised that she will return to Manchester following the terror attack there to spend time with her fans and to "have a benefit concert in honour of and to raise money for the victims and their family."

Grande announced her intentions in an uplifting letter posted online that called on her fans to have courage following the attacks, and expressed a deep sense of sorrow for those lost and the families who are mourning their loved ones following the "heinous" attack.

"I don't want to go the rest of the year without being able to see and hold and uplift my fans," she wrote, "the same way they continue to uplift me."

In the letter, Grande said that the spirit of music and her fans runs contrary to the intentions and hatred that would have motivated someone to initiate the attack outside of her concert in Manchester earlier this week. She vowed that the attack would not change that.

"When you look into the audience at my shows, you see a beautiful, diverse, pure, happy crowd. Thousands of people, incredibly different, all there for the same reason, music," she wrote. "Music is something that everyone on Earth can share. Music is meant to heal us, to bring us together, to make us happy. So that is what it will continue to do for us."

Soon after tweeting the letter, she sent out a link to a local fundraiser established by the Manchester Evening News. That effort had already raised nearly £1.7 million.

Twenty-two people, including children, were killed Monday when a suicide bomber detonated a bomb just outside of a concert Grande had just finished in Manchester Monday. Several dozen were taken to the hospital with injuries.

Grande did not say when she would return for the benefit concert, but said that she would give her fans all of the details as soon as she has them.