Ake Arts &
Book Festival
19-21 November, 2026
Now in its fourteenth year, Aké Arts & Book Festival has brought together over 1,000 writers, poets, musicians, actors, filmmakers, artists and thinkers to celebrate creativity, network and share stories. This year, the festival returns with a fantastic programme of events including panel discussions, book chats, poetry and music. Join us for three days of cultural immersion!
Ake Arts &
Book Festival
2026 Theme | NATIVE INTELLIGENCE
Long before the algorithm, there was the elder and the proverb. Native Intelligence sits at the crossroads of what we have long known and what the machine is only now learning to mimic.
Across the continent, artificial intelligence is reshaping how stories are told, how elections are fought, and how truth itself is reported. Yet beneath the noise, other ways of knowing persist, carried in language, in ritual, and in our communities.
Festival Books 2026
BOOK SPOTLIGHT
WHERE YOU
GO, I WILL GO
By Christina Fonthes
London, 2004. Bijoux has a secret. To the world, she is the obedient child, dutifully attending prayer meetings and following the rigid expectations of her silent and austere Pentecostal aunt, Tantine Mireille. But Bijoux is in love with a woman. She has been for a year. When her aunt wants her to marry one of the young men from the church, Bijoux has to make a decision.
Kinshasa, 1980s. Mira is the teenage daughter of a family on the rise. When she falls in love with an impoverished singer, a criminal the eyes of her parents, her choices will set her on a dramatic path that winds its way across oceans and decades.
Vividly bringing to life the Congo and its diaspora, Where You Go, I Will Go weaves Bijoux and Mira’s stories together across two continents, two generations, through the mess of love and sexuality, and the pull of mother-daughter relationships, to finally bring them to a place of belonging – home.
Watch on-demand
Interview | Bernardine Evaristo
From the 2025 Festival
Book Chat | Mrs Kuti
From the 2025 Festival
Panel Discussion | Whose Truth Is It Anyway?
From the 2025 Festival
Music | The Recurrence
From the 2025 Festival