British production company, Working Title, has acquired the film rights to Bolu Babalola’s novel Honey & Spice. The company is behind rom-com classics such as Bridget Jones, Notting Hill, and Love Actually. Babalola is set to adapt the screenplay, making it her debut as a feature film screenwriter. Back in 2021, The Babalola developed a TV pilot called ‘Big Age,’ which she created, wrote, and executive-produced. The series was never picked up for a full series, but she never stopped pursuing her dreams.
Babalola shared her excitement on Instagram: “So excited to bring Kiki & Malakai’s story to the big screen with @workingtitlefilms! My debut film. And I am writing too!! I am working HARD in the kitchen! It is quite literally a dream come true to work with the best to ever do it in the romcom biz, and they are such wonderful producing partners.”
What is ‘Honey & Spice’ about?
Set at Whitewell University, sharp-tongued Kiki Banjo hosts the popular student radio show Brown Sugar, where she helps the women of the African-Caribbean Society not get caught up in situationships, players, and heartbreak. Kiki, the expert in relationship evasion, breaks her number one rule when she kisses Malaki Korede, whom she just publicly called out as “The Wastemen of Whitewell.” Finding her show on the chopping block, the two enter a fake relationship to try to redeem their reputations and keep their futures intact.
‘Honey & Spice’ is influenced by Babalola’s time at University. When speaking to The Bookseller, the author explained, “I came to uni, and as a Black woman, I was made to feel like a minority and was excluded from some things. I was looking for a place that I could call home, looking for some familiarity, and I found that in the Afro-Caribbean Society, where I met a lot of my friends.”
Babalola also told The Bookseller that the name of her novel ties back to her Yoruba heritage, as honey and pepper are frequently used in traditional Yoruba ceremonies.
Bolu Babalola’s Success with Honey & Spice
After ‘Honey & Spice’ was published, it became a bestseller in the U.K. and the U.S. The novel was chosen for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club and TikTok’s Book Club. ‘Honey & Spice’ was the recommended book of the year by several media outlets, including the New York Times, TIME, NPR, and Waterstones, and won the TikTok Book of the Year award. At the 2023 British Book Awards, ‘Honey & Spice’ made the Debut Fiction category of the Book of the Year shortlist.
Who is Bolu Babalola?
Babalola is a British-Nigerian author, journalist, and screenwriter. She gained popularity as an author with her debut short story collection, ‘Love in Color: Mythical Tales from Around the World, Retold’ (2020). The collection was an international bestseller, which was shortlisted for the Waterstones Book of the Year. The self-proclaimed “Romcomoisseur” grew up on romance novels and the golden era of rom-com films.
Born in Southwark, London, to Nigerian parents, Babalola always knew she wanted to be a writer. “I’ve written since I was literally seven years old, [so a] writer wasn’t something that I chose to be. But I did choose to work on my craft, I did choose to study it, I did choose to be very meticulous about it,” she explained. Some of her literary inspirations include Raven Leilani, Akwaeke Emezi, Toni Morrison, and Jane Austen.
Babalola has a law degree from the University of Reading and a master’s in American politics and history at University College London. After her time at University, Babalola worked for the BBC and wrote for several publications like Vulture, Vice, and Stylist.
When it comes to her writing, Babalola is on a mission to normalize Black women in healthy, loving relationships. The themes of her work boil down to “equality, a woman having agency over her desire, and sisterhood.” In Babalola’s interview with W Magazine, she states that she is from the “Beyoncé school of discipline,” as in everything that has her name associated with it has to have her involved. Her discipline is a throughline as it carries in her feminist narratives, her characters that wear their African names proudly, not italicizing Yoruba words to equate them to English ones and having dark-skinned women on the cover of her books: “I wanted it to be a dark-skinned Black woman on the cover,” referring to Honey & Spice’s colorful book jacket and how she played a role in everything about Kiki’s appearance “down to the colors and her braids and her nose ring.”
While you wait for the film, you can read the sequel to ‘Honey & Spice’ titled, ‘Sweet Heat’.
