Toxic Truths: Lola Akinmade Åkerström & Helen Walsh

Lola Akinmade Åkerström, Helen Walsh and Wendy O’Brien

Toxic Truths: Lola Akinmade Åkerström & Helen Walsh

Lola Akinmade Åkerström, Helen Walsh and Wendy O’Brien

3:30pm

Friday, October 22

Tune in to an engaging talk with authors Lola Akinmade Åkerström and Helen Walsh about their powerful debut novels, exploring important social issues, from racism, classism and fetishization; to contemporary feminism and toxic masculinity in the #MeToo age. In Nigerian-American writer and photographer Lola Akinmade Åkerström’s In Every Mirror She’s Black, three Black women are linked in unexpected ways to the same influential white man in Stockholm as they build new lives in the most open society run by the most private people. Walsh’s suspenseful, propulsive mystery Pull Focus follows a woman whose partner suddenly goes missing under threatening circumstances, just as she is thrust into the role of director for a major film festival when her boss is removed for sexual harassment.

Interviewer: Wendy O’Brien

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Conversation
Reading

Tune in to an engaging talk with authors Lola Akinmade Åkerström and Helen Walsh about their powerful debut novels, exploring important social issues, from racism, classism and fetishization; to contemporary feminism and toxic masculinity in the #MeToo age. In Nigerian-American writer and photographer Lola Akinmade Åkerström’s In Every Mirror She’s Black, three Black women are linked in unexpected ways to the same influential white man in Stockholm as they build new lives in the most open society run by the most private people. Walsh’s suspenseful, propulsive mystery Pull Focus follows a woman whose partner suddenly goes missing under threatening circumstances, just as she is thrust into the role of director for a major film festival when her boss is removed for sexual harassment.

Interviewer: Wendy O’Brien

English captioning is available for this video. Please click the ‘CC’ button in the video toolbar to turn it on.

Conversation
Reading

Featured Authors

Lola Akinmade Åkerström
Lola Akinmade Åkerström is an award-winning Nigerian-American author, speaker, and photographer based in Sweden. Her work has appeared in National Geographic Traveler, BBC, CNN, The Guardian, New York Times, Travel + Leisure, Slate and Lonely Planet, among others. She is the author of the 2018 Lowell Thomas Award winner for best travel book, Due North, and the bestselling LAGOM: Swedish Secret of Living Well, available in 18 foreign language editions. She has been recognized with multiple awards for her photography work. In Every Mirror She’s Black is her first novel.

Read more about Lola Akinmade Åkerström

Helen Walsh
Helen Walsh is the founder and president of Diaspora Dialogues, Canada's premier literary mentoring organization. Formerly the publisher of the Literary Review of Canada and a founding director of Spur, a national festival of politics, arts, and ideas, Walsh spent five years working as a film/digital media producer in L.A. and New York. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Read more about Helen Walsh

Wendy O’Brien
Wendy O’Brien is a philosopher with an avid interest in the ways philosophy, literature and the visual arts overlap. After over 30 years in academe teaching and lecturing at Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, Wilfrid Laurier University, the University of Waterloo, Harvard and Oxford, she recently retired to be able to explore these points of intersection in non-academic settings.  Her work explores subjects including power, violence, the relation to the Other, home, silence and creativity. She is presently working on a long-term project on the concept of wonder. An active member of the Ontario literary scene, she has been an interviewer for organizations including By the Lake Book Club, the Toronto International Festival of Authors and GritLit, as well as hosting Bourbon and Books book club in both Toronto and Hamilton.

Read more about Wendy O’Brien

3:30pm

Friday, October 22

What to read

In Every Mirror She’s Black by , Pull Focus by ,
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