“Two guns. A dream duo”. The Foundation for Collective Propaganda of the Dutch Book (CPNB) is pleased to have Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer and Marieke Lucas Rijneveld as Boekenweek authors 2022. Pfeijffer writes the Boekenweekgift, Rijneveld the Boekenweekessay. The theme of the Boekenweek next year is ‘first love’.
“An honorable task,” is what Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer calls writing the Boekenweekgift. “I’ve put my other work aside. This is a major issue, not an afterthought.”
This also applies to Marieke Lucas Rijneveld. “I started right away. It’s such a beautiful theme. Love has so many appearances, it’s really a joy to write about this.”
Theme of the Book Week 2022 is ‘first love’.
Pfeijffer (53) is a poet, novelist and classicist. He wrote the novels Grand Hotel Europe and La Superba. Rijneveld (30) won with The evening is discomfort last year’s Booker International Prize.
“It will be a Book Week that you cannot ignore,” says CPNB director Eveline Aendekerk. “That is much needed, because the physical bookstores are still in heavy weather. The corona crisis has brought more people to read, but many books are bought online. That’s why we chose these two, so hopefully they will cause long queues at the bookstores.”
According to the CPNB, this year’s editions (written by Hanna Bervoets and Roxane van Iperen) also helped with sales in brick-and-mortar stores. More than half of all turnover came from physical points of sale. The rest of the year was 35 percent, partly due to the strict lockdown at the beginning of the year.