© Rachael Stretcher
Kopano Matlwa
Kopano Matlwa is a South African public health physician & novelist. She is founding Executive Director of the Grow Great Campaign ―a South African campaign aimed at galvanizing a national commitment to zero stunting in South Africa by 2030.
Kopano is a Rhodes Scholar and an alumnus of the University of Oxford where she gained both her masters and DPhil in Public Health. Kopano is a published fiction writer and the winner of the European Literary Award (2007) and joint winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa (2010). Her three novels Coconut, Spilt Milk and Evening Primrose/Period Pain are social commentaries on post-apartheid South Africa and between them, have been received over a dozen international rights deals. Evening Primrose/Period Pain was in 2017/18 shortlisted for the Sunday Times Literary Award, the South African Literary Awards and South Africa’s Humanities & Social Sciences Awards.
In 2020 Kopano Matlwa Mabaso was celebrated as a ‘Hero in the Field’ by Bill Gates, on his personal blog, Gates Notes.
