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Nigerian-American and based in Sweden, Lola Akinmade Åkerström is an award-winning author, speaker, and photographer. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, BBC, CNN, The Guardian, Sunday Times Travel, The Telegraph, New York Times, Travel + Leisure, Slate, Travel Channel, Adventure Magazine, Lonely Planet, amongst others.
In addition to contributing to several books, she is the author of the following books: 2018 Lowell Thomas Award winner for best travel book, Due North, bestselling Lagom: Swedish Secret of Living Well, available in 18 foreign language editions, and internationally-acclaimed In Every Mirror She's Black.
She has been recognized with multiple awards for her work, including being named a 2022 Hasselblad Heroine and receiving the 2018 Travel Photographer of the Year Bill Muster Award. She was honored with a MIPAD 100 (Most Influential People of African Descent) Award within media and culture in 2018. She contributed to National Geographic's Image Collection. She is based in Stockholm and tweets at @LolaAkinmade.
Lola Akinmade Akerstrom's website
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What was the inspiration for In Every Mirror She's Black?
What did you draw on as you developed the story?
In Every Mirror She's Black was a story that organically developed after years of living in Sweden and observing how the voices of Black women resonate within society, which spaces we are invited to occupy or not, and if those spaces allow us to thrive or simply survive. Having lived in both Nigeria and the U.S. for extended periods of time before moving to Sweden, I wanted to pull out the nuances of navigating the world in my skin against the backdrop of very different cultures.
You took on some very serious social issues in this novel: racism, classicism, sexism, fetishization of Black bodies. Why did you feel it was important to tackle each of them in this book?
They often say debut novelists are quite ambitious because we want to tackle every single societal problem in a single book. With In Every Mirror She's Black, I wanted to address them in a seamless way while spotlighting all these issues because they aren't mutually exclusive.
At what point does racism become tokenism as one moves into a certain economic class, and isn't tokenism a form of racism? Can one have sexism without some form of ...
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