The CPNB, the promotional organisation for book trade in The Netherlands, is happy to announce that bestselling South African author Deon Meyer will be writing the gift book for the 2017 Crime & Thriller Book Weeks.
Meyer, who has been described by the Times as “One of the sharpest thriller writers around”, broke through in the Netherlands in 2012 with Thirteen Hours, which was awarded the VN Thriller of the Year award. He has received international praise and his books have been translated into 25 languages. He is published in the Netherlands by A.W. Bruna Uitgevers. The Crime & Thriller Book Weeks will run from Friday 9 through Sunday 25 June 2017. During this period, bookshops will give away a free copy of Meyer’s book to every customer who spends at least €12.50 on books in Dutch.
The central theme of the 2017 Crime & Thriller Book Weeks is the thriller as holiday book. For 40% of Dutch people, holidays provide an opportunity to read more books than normal. On average, we take six books with us when we travel. Thrillers are the most-read fiction genre, and in the run-up to the spring and summer holidays, they make up 37% of the total turnover from fiction sales (source: KVB-SMB/GfK).
Previous authors for this campaign include Stephen King, Henning Mankell, Ian Rankin, Minette Walters, Dick Francis, Frederick Forsyth, Elizabeth George, Dean Koontz, Robin Cook, Karin Slaughter, Tess Gerritsen and James Ellroy.
“It is a great honour to be the Crime & Thriller Book Weeks gift book author for 2017”, says Deon Meyer about his commission to write the gift book. “I appreciate what the CPNB stands for and feel privileged to be able to promote the genre in which I write. It gives me a great deal of pleasure – and also scares me somewhat – to be following in the footsteps of authors I have admired for many years.”
Deon Meyer lives and works near Cape Town. After a career as, among other things, a reporter, press information officer, copywriter and creative director, he switched to focusing fully on writing. In 2012, Meyer’s second thriller in the series about Inspector Bennie Griessel, Thirteen Hours, was named Thriller of the Year by the Vrij Nederland Detective & Thrillergids (a guide to mystery books and thrillers), heralding his ultimate breakthrough in the Netherlands and Flanders. To date, A.W. Bruna Uitgevers have published ten of his crime thrillers and several of his short stories. Meyer combines the socially critical themes and extremely human characters that typify Scandinavian crime literature with the rapid, plot-driven action of the American thriller tradition. All of this is set against the background of present-day South Africa, with its broad diversity of communities, cultures and languages.
Deon’s new novel KOORS (FEVER in English) will be published in South Africa in Afrikaans in August 2016 by Tafelberg, with a major press campaign. It will be published in English and translation elsewhere in translation from 2017.
See more on Deon’s website, including news of events.