The Cheeky Natives

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What does a family owe the son it loved but never quite managed to reach? I
In this live Pagecast recording from Open Book Festival 2026, Letlhogonolo Mokgoroane sits down with Glasgow-born doctor and debut novelist Selali Fiamanya to talk about Before We Hit the Ground, his novel longlisted for Scotland's Fiction Book of the Year. 
On his first trip to South Africa, Fiamanya talks about characters caught in free fall, what medicine has taught him about mortality and listening to everyone's side of a story, and four Ghanaian-Scottish lives that each have a different, maybe incompatible, idea of home. 
He doesn't flinch from the hard questions: Elom's family loved him and still couldn't tell him it was safe to be gay; Ben is neither villain nor hero; and Fiamanya respectfully parts ways with bell hooks, arguing that love and cruelty can live in the same house. 
He remembers recording the audiobook in a London booth days before his final medical exams, and explains why a novel that opens with a death should feel surprising but inevitable. 
He closes with a reading from Abena's first rainy April in 1989 Glasgow. When asked what he hopes readers take with them? A little grace for the people around us, even when they get it wrong. 

A conversation about home, silence, and learning how to love and be loved.
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What do we inherit from our parents when the past they hid turns out to be the country's past too? 
In this live Pagecast recording from Open Book Festival 2026, Dr Alma-Nalisha Cele sits down with researcher in mental health and human rights, Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner and debut novelist Faraaz Mahomed to talk about Motherland. 
The conversation moves through the two lives he leads on the page, the decade since "The Pigeon" changed what he allowed himself to write, and the discovery at the heart of the novel: a mother's affair with the apartheid architect of the Group Areas Act. 
Mahomed speaks about telling the story across three voices and three generations, drawing a line from Rhodes Must Fall in Cape Town to Black Lives Matter in New York, and the difference between the family you are born into and the brother you find. 
He closes with a reading from Harlem streets thick with zouk, Afrobeat and Coltrane. 
When asked what one thing he hopes the book brings home to South African readers? The eyes of an eight-year-old who looks at the world she is inheriting and sees that it makes no sense. 
A conversation about inheritance, injustice, and being reintroduced to the people we thought we knew.

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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.
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What does a body do when the world was never built to hold it? 

In this live Pagecast recording from Open Book Festival 2026, Advocate Letlhogonolo Mokgoroane sits down with poet, disability awareness activist and lead editor of English Alive Kirsten Deane to talk about Disabled, But, her debut poetry collection from uHlanga Press. 

The conversation moves through the unfinished "but" of the title, a word that refuses to let anyone settle into a comfortable sentence about disability. Deane reads the opening poem of the collection, a piece that treats seizures as the body dancing and scars as big girl teeth coming out. 
We talk about the difference between visible and invisible disability, about pain as a companion rather than an enemy, about the cruelty of childhood and the arithmetic of desirability when the culture has never once put a disabled body on its mood board.
 Deane is unflinching about sexual violence against disabled women, about a world that swings between pity and erasure, and about poetry as the only form that can make a reader feel the discomfort of navigating the world in a body that "switches its mind." 

When asked what a poem can do that a campaign cannot? Force people to listen. A conversation about bones, honesty, and the refusal to be left behind.
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What happens when a god no one believes in anymore still has something to say?

In this live Pagecast recording from Open Book Festival 2026, Letlhogonolo sits down with Nigerian writer I.O. Echeruo to talk about his debut novel Comfort of Distant Stars, a 2026 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction finalist. The conversation moves through the novel's opening: a three-year-old led through rain and red clay to be made a high chief, and from there into the collision between Igbo cosmology and modern physics, the quiet comedy of family, and what it means to question reality at every level, from religious belief to the very notion of personhood.

Echeruo speaks about Anyanwy, the Igbo sun god almost no one remembers, and how that forgetting became the engine of the novel. We talk about whether madness is a disagreement about reality or a numbers game, why Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God remains his reference point for everything he writes, and what it means to bring a deeply Nigerian story to a South African readership. He also picks Ghanaian jollof, on the record, under what he insists is duress.

A conversation about myth, mathematics, and the fever dream where they meet.

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