WINTERSWIJK – On Sunday April 14, the Library in Winterswijk will be all about Young Adult books and BookTok. Writer Rima Orie gives a lecture and signs her books. In addition, popular BookTokkers Melissa (melissasbooks) and Dilayra (gayotic_bookworm) are present to teach everyone the intricacies of BookTokken.
Writer Rima Orie (Utrecht, March 31, 1994) studied law at Utrecht University. She obtained her master’s degree in Private Law in 2017. Orie works as a lawyer.
She wrote on online platforms for years before publishing her first book. In 2018, under the pseudonym Mira Noir, she won the Moon YA Contest with De Zwendelprins. With this she won a publishing contract with Uitgeverij Moon. The book was published in 2019, under her own name.
The Swindle Prince was nominated for the Hebban Debut Prize, the Best Book for Young People and De Kleine Cervantes, the youth literature prize of the city of Ghent. In 2023 she was awarded the prize for the Best Book for Young People for In the cursed heart.
BookTok
BookTok, also known as BoekTok in Dutch, is a phenomenon on social media. The trend emerged in 2020, during the corona pandemic. By June 2022, more than 27 billion videos had already been created with the hashtag BookTok . In August of that year, videos with this hashtag had already been viewed more than 73 billion times, the Dutch version more than 88 million times.
The hashtag BookTok is used, mainly by young people on TikTok, to share book reviews. This often appears to be adolescent literature, literature with a recognizable story such as love and friendship and literature with a target audience between fifteen and twenty-eight year olds. In Belgium and the Netherlands, English-language books in particular are experiencing positive consequences. A comparison between 2021 and 2022 showed a fifteen percent increase in the number of English-language books sold at the Belgian bookstore chain Standaard Boekhandel. Dutch-language books, on the other hand, did not experience an increase. In addition to buying books, lending books also increased in popularity.
