By Aderinola Omotosho
British-Nigerian author Bolu Babalola is officially taking Honey and Spice from the page to the screen — and she’s writing the screenplay herself. Working Title, the studio behind Bridget Jones, Notting Hill, and Love Actually, has optioned the film rights, setting Babalola up for her feature debut as a screenwriter. It’s not just an adaptation — it feels like a full-circle moment. The novel that introduced the world to Kiki Banjo is now being translated by the one person who knows her best, the woman who wrote her.
Honey and Spice follows Kiki, the sharp-tongued university radio host who built a reputation on avoiding romantic disasters and warning other girls about them. She’s precise, smart, and certain — until the exact boy she warned her friends about, Malakai Korede, becomes the person she can’t quite avoid. What starts as a “fake dating” setup slowly becomes something more intricate — love, vulnerability, and Black British identity woven into a campus story that never tries to dilute itself to appeal to anyone.
That’s one reason the book worked — it played by its own rules and still became a bestseller in both the UK and the U.S. It went on to win TikTok’s first-ever Book of the Year award and earned praise from Waterstones, TIME, NPR, and The New York Times, which called it rich with cultural observation.
Now, the studio known for shaping the rom-com canon is betting on a new voice — one that doesn’t just love the genre, but openly studies it. Bolu Babalola calls herself a “romcomoisseur”, and her writing has always been intentional about how Black love is portrayed on the page: clever, joyful, emotionally present. That intention is what makes this adaptation significant. Instead of handing the story over to a stranger, Working Title is letting Babalola write it herself. In the rom-com world, that’s rare — and it signals trust. It also protects what made the novel resonate in the first place: the language, the humor, the cultural nuance that readers recognised instantly.
There’s also something personal about watching this come full circle. Babalola has said Honey and Spice is loosely based on her own experience. And now she gets to shape the film version, too — a version that doesn’t need translation. The same way she refused to italicise Yoruba words in her novel, she now gets the chance to keep that voice intact on screen. If it’s done well, this could quietly shift what a mainstream rom-com looks like — who it centers, what it sounds like, and the kind of love it believes in.
There’s no release date yet, and casting hasn’t been announced, but this deal already marks a turning point in her career. She previously wrote and created the Channel 4 pilot Big Age, but this will be her first feature screenplay. And beyond the adaptation, she’s not slowing down — her latest novel, Sweet Heat, was published this summer, continuing Kiki and Malakai’s story years later.
What’s happening here is bigger than one book becoming a film. It’s a rom-com legacy studio opening its doors to a new kind of storyteller, and choosing not to dilute her voice in the process. A bestselling novel written with cultural certainty is now being adapted with the same certainty. Honey, spice — and full authorship.
