The Cheeky Natives
Pagecast at Open Book Festival 2026: Lọlá Ákínmádé Åkerström, Bitter Honey
Send us Fan Mail What happens when a woman who built her name behind a camera picks up a pen to tell the story a photograph cannot hold? In this live Pagecast recording from Open Book Festival 2026, Dr Alma-Nalisha Cele sits down with Nigerian-American author, photographer and international bestseller Lọlá Ákínmádé Åkerström to talk about Bitter Honey , her first historical novel spanning four decades and three continents. The conversation moves through the discipline of chasing light, the politics of who gets to frame African women and how, and why the stories we most urgently need to tell sit in the middle, between the poverty narrative and the affluence counter-narrative. Ákínmádé Åkerström reads from the backstage scene that cracks open Tina's world, speaks about going back to 1970s Stockholm to find the source beneath the symptoms of contemporary displacement, and why writing a character like Leif meant refusing every label in favour of tenderness. Toni Morrison said write the story you want to read. Alice Walker said go where the silence is. When asked what grace allows two very different women to do? See a bit of themselves in each other. A conversation about light, language, and the stubborn insistence that we are already enough. Support the show follow us on social media @cheekynatives
