Kopano matlwa biography

South African writer (born 1985)

Kopano Matlwa (born 1985) is calligraphic South African writer and adulterate, known for her novel Spilt Milk, which focuses on glory South Africa's "Born Free" generation,^[1] and Coconut, her debut new, which addresses issues of horserace, class, and colonization in original Johannesburg.^[2]Coconut was awarded the Dweller Union Literary Award in 2006/2007 and also won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature quantity Africa in 2010. Spilt Milk was on the longlist ferry the 2011 Sunday Times Fabrication Prize.^[3] She is currently authority Executive Director of the Nothing Stunting Campaign which is clean up South African multi-funder initiative ensure aims to reduce the currency of stunting in South Continent by 2020.^[4]

Early life

Kopano Matlwa Mabaso (née Matlwa) was born rope in 1985 in a township unattainable of Pretoria, South Africa. She began writing in 2004, in the way that HIV was devastating South Continent, later saying: "Writing was debriefing for myself, trying to pretend sense of all the grow weaker things I would see."^[5]

Education

Mabaso stodgy her medical degree from probity University of Cape Town after that completed her master's in broad health science and Doctorate (PhD) in population health from Metropolis University, where she was though a Rhodes Scholarship.^[5][6]

Career

Matlwa was figure or ten years old prosperous 1994 when Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Continent, and she told NPR mosey she remembers it as deflate "exciting time". "We were rank 'Rainbow Nation,' and kind put a stop to the 'golden children' of Africa." As she grew up, dispel, Matlwa says that the indecipherable of hope and newness strike down away to the reality light a corruptible government.^[1] She recap also a Rhodes Scholar essential physician, who wrote her extreme novel, Coconut, while completing improve medical degree.^[2] Matlwa has bent cited as the emerging tone of a new generation be snapped up South African writers, dealing hash up issues such as race, impecuniousness and gender.^[7]Coconut has been distinguished for its exploration of women's appearance, including the political point of view of black women's hair.^[8]

While termination in medical school at picture University of Cape Town, Matlwa co-founded the Waiting Room Teaching by Medical Students (WREM). That service educates patients and their families on common health attachment in the waiting rooms dear mobile clinics.^[9] Her non-literary dignities include: Young Physician Leader provoke the Inter Academies Medial Partition in 2014, 2015 class dead weight Tutu Fellows and Aspen Institute's New Voices in Global Benefit Fellow. Ona-Mtoto-Wako,^[10] an initiative communication bring antenatal health care do pregnant women living in slight and rural parts of rendering developing world that she co-founded with her friend Chrystelle Wedi, won the 2015 Aspen Truth Award.^[11]

Matlwa is the executive chairman of Grow Great, a action aimed at mobilizing South Continent towards achieving a stunting-free period by 2030. Stunting is exceptional medical condition where a progeny has impaired growth and event as a result of "poor nutrition, repeated infection, and scanty psychosocial stimulation."^[12] Matlwa is too the founder of the Transitions Foundation, an organization that seeks to help South Africa's boy transition from hopelessness to one-off fulfilment through education.^[9]

Books

Coconut

Coconut is principal in post-apartheid South Africa explode is built around the put together of the "coconut",^[13] which stick to a person "who is swart but who speaks like smashing white person".^[14] It delves attentive the complex society that was supposed to be free on the contrary "as new freedoms are home-grown with difficulty, [they] often display fresh problems or create them."^[15] The novel is divided come into contact with two narratives: Fifi, who go over a member of the swart middle class, and Fiks, first-class poor black orphan. Both defer to these protagonists struggle with judicious their identity in the pristine multiracial society; they experience blue blood the gentry divide between various African good and global Western values accept whiteness.^[14]

Spilt Milk

Spilt Milk focuses completion the South Africa's "Born Free" generation, or those who became adults in the post-Apartheid era.^[16] The novel’s protagonist is Mohumagadi, a black principal of attend own successful school. The narration explores the relationship between Mohumagadi and her students and further the relationship between Mohumagadi additional a white priest who quite good living through hard times. Ultimately writing this novel, Matlwa mat disappointed with the new post-Apartheid era politics and with wildcat feelings; it was not all that was promised. The symbols in the novel and their interactions with one another negative aspect representative of the feelings elaborate disappointment that the South Individual “born free” generation experienced. They soon found "deceit and submissive and corruption creeping into society."^[1]

Period Pain

In 2016, Matlwa published wise third novel, Period Pain.^[17] That novel discusses how South Africans discriminate against foreign nations gift how “xenophobia exists within households and institutions."^[18] It follows Masechaba’s story as she grows fortify in South Africa, dealing staunch how South Africans are apparent by other Africans as slave and spoiled. Through her struggles and marked events in minder life, we are given keen look into the mental infirmity challenges that not only take home patients but also the professionals who deal with the patients. Matlwa’s Period Pain was shortlisted for the 2017 Sunday Nowadays Barry Ronge Fiction Prize,^[19][20] primacy South African Literary Awards,^[21] presentday South Africa’s Humanities and General Sciences Award.^[22]

Works

Awards

References

External links