By Sarah Madani
Photo Source: Instagram (@emirateslitfest)
The red-carpeted TikTok Book Awards Middle East and North Africa took place on 4 February 2024, in collaboration with the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in Dubai. Drawing out resident creators in the region, book lovers won awards for showcasing their love of literature through their creation of creative content on TikTok. The event was the closing ceremony of the literary event, dropping the curtains on the 16th edition of the festival responsible for uniting a variety of talents under one roof.
“The way we talk about books has evolved,” said Ahlam Bolooki, Director of the Emirates LitFest, and added that the festival recognizes the need to evolve with the changing times by focusing on where young people’s attention is. “The fact that book conversations are booming on Tiktok is a hopeful sign that the love of books is still very much alive and thriving,” says Ahlam.
Reader recommendations of the post-pandemic era have quickly evolved from the photo-limited Bookstagram to the worldwide community of Booktok, where users critically talk about books, obsess over and cosplay as their chosen characters, and recommend their favorite reads.
TikTok’s overarching reach into the publishing world is evident from the 28.3 million hashtags against Booktok – a community of book lovers that discusses everything from books, authors, and publishing, even including matters revolving around the political and personal views of authors.
Since its creation, there have been various subculture spaces under Booktok. Previous examples include the niche of 'aesthetics' such as #DarkAcademia (romanticizing the yearning for knowledge). The sepia-hued hashtag reawakened the popularity of Donna Tart’s The Secret History dubbed as the “true bible” of Dark Academia.
A recent, more revolutionary example is that of young people on BookTok picking up Islam’s sacred text, the Quran, to understand the resilience of the Muslim Palestinians despite facing genocide and having been under constant bombardment by US-backed Israeli bombs since October 2023.
In contrast to the MENA version, the first-ever award ceremony created for the Booktok community was the TikTok Book Awards UK and Ireland 2023. It was hosted in partnership with Wales’s Hay Festival of Literature and Arts and was a book-themed Oscars for authors, books, indie bookstores, and the top creator of the hashtag. Judges curated a list of candidates and the final decision was left to the public. The seven award categories included BookTok Book Of The Year, BookTok Author Of The Year, and BookTok Creator Of The Year, among others.
Photo Source: TikTok Newsroom
The MENA version had five winning categories for any creators who would tailor book content in the duration of two weeks for the award show: Best Book Reviewer, Best Arabic Book Reviewer, Best Author Creator, Best Bookstore Creator, and Best Book Artist.
The five winners corresponding to the respective categories were Toqa Hossam, Sara Islam, Abdullah Al Alawi, Kalemat, and Uzma Rahil.
The audience of the award show comprised of best-selling authors and about 50 content creators, among others. The Emirates LitFest is an internationally leading event and the largest in the MENA celebrating and forming a vital part of the region’s close-knit literary landscape, “Our festival is all about the community and that's the nature in which we celebrated the book talk awards as well,” says Ahlam Bolooki.
Omani youth ambassador, Omar al Balooshi, agrees that events such as the TikTok Book Awards encourage reading among young people. He was one of the many youth ambassadors attending the LitFest from the GCC and Arab countries including, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Bahrain.
An avid reader and student at Sultan Qaboos University, Omar says, “We are attending these sessions to know more about Arabic literature.” Omar, alongside his fellow youth ambassadors, stood up chanting “Arabi!” during the climax of the award show which featured performances by Emirati singer Abdullah Al Shamsi who chose to sing in English rather than Arabic.
Internationally best-selling romance author Cecelia Ahern was one of the judges of the ceremony and believes that it is important to have a vibrant book community on TikTok, “Anything that encourages more reading, I am in full support of. There are so many things for people to be doing now like [watching] movies, TV, and a million apps on their phone. We want people to read.”
Cecelia was awed by the creativity of the participants, “If BookTok is going to help you read more then so be it.”
