Kopano matlwa biography for kids
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This doctor/novelist fryst vatten tackling malnutrition
Kopano Matlwa Mabaso began her medical education during a terrifying era. The year was , and virus was devastating whole communities in South Africa, including the township outside Pretoria where she was born. For years, President Thabo Mbeki had denied people access to lifesaving anti-retroviral medicines. When my dad traveled to South Africa with Jimmy Carter to highlight this issue, he watched President Carter nearly come to blows with Mbeki.
To cope with the demands of medical school and the tragedy of what she was seeing all around her, Dr. Matlwa Mabaso started writing her first novel. “It was such a tough time,” she explains. “Writing was debriefing for myself, trying to make sense of all the crazy things inom would see.” She published that novel, Coconut, when she was only 21 and still in medical school. It became a bestseller and earned her international acclaim.
But her literary talent did not pull her away from her main goal:
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Kopano Matlwa
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Kopano Matlwa (born ) is a South African writer known for her novel Spilt Milk, which focuses on the South Africa's "Born Free" generation, or those who became adults in the post-Apartheid era[1] and Coconut, her debut novel, which addresses issues of race, class and colonization in modern Johannesburg.[2] Coconut was awarded the European Union Literary Award in /07 and also won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa in Spilt Milk made the long list for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize.[3] Matlwa is influenced by her youth when writing. She was nine or 10 years old in when Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa, and she told NPR that she remembers it as an "exciting time": "We were the 'Rainbow Nation,' and kind of the 'golden children' of Africa." As she grew up, however, she says that sense of hope and newness fell away to the reality of a corruptible government
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Kopano Matlwa is an inspirational young South African woman in her mids who has already achieved more than most of us dream of achieving in a lifetime. She has completed her medical degree, won a scholarship to complete her masters at Oxford University in the UK, and written two award-winning novels.
Her list of achievements (which she won&#;t want used to define her) includes being selected as one of eight Goldman Sachs Global Leaders in and making the Mail & Guardian &#; young South Africans you must take to lunch&#; list two years in a row.
The eldest of Matsobane and Ingrid Matlwa&#;s three children, Kopano was born at the Mamelodi Day Hospital in Pretoria in As big sister to Tumelo and Manewa, she grew up in Midrand in Gauteng and won a scholarship to attend St Peter&#;s College in Sunninghill, Johannesburg, on the northern border of Eskom&#;s Megawatt Park.
Kopano was selected as Head Girl at high school, achieved full academic colours and matriculated with seven disti