The Great Hippopotamus Hotel

Alexander McCall Smith is one of the world’s most prolific and popular authors. His career has been a varied one: for many years he was a professor of medical law and worked in universities in the United Kingdom and abroad. After the publication of his highly successful No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, which has sold over twenty million copies, he devoted his time to writing fiction and has seen his various series translated into over forty languages and become bestsellers through the world. McCall Smith won the prestigious The Dagger in the Library Award in 2004, an award bestowed by the Crime Writers' Association.

Adjoa Andoh is a British film, television, stage and radio actress. She is a familiar face on British television – starring in two series of Doctor Who, BBC's long-running medical drama Casualty and popular soap opera EastEnders – and has more recently appeared as Lady Danbury in the Netflix series Bridgerton. A renowned stage actor, Andoh has been celebrated for lead roles at the National Theatreand the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she played Portia in Julius Caesar, Ulysses in Troilus & Cressida and Helen of Troy in The Odyssey. In 2019 she conceived, co-directed, and played Richard II at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, in the UK’s first all women-of-colour production. She made her Hollywood debut in 2009, starring alongside Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon in Clint Eastwood’s biographical sports film Invictus. Other film appearances include Adulthood, Brotherhood, and I Is A Long Memoried Woman. Andoh has been a BBC radio actor for more than 30 years and is an accomplished and award-winning narrator of more than 150 audiobooks, including Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Naomi Alderman’s The Power and all of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series of novels by Alexander McCall Smith. Andoh won the Audie Award for Audiobook of the Year for #10 in that series, Tea Time for the Traditionally Built. In 2023 Andoh was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was on the judging panel for the 2023 Booker Prize.