Kopano Mabaso, born in 1985 in a township outside Pretoria, South Africa, is a writer and medical doctor known for her award-winning novels Coconut and Spilt Milk. Coconut, which explores themes of race, class, and colonization in Johannesburg, won the European Union Literary Award and the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Spilt Milk was longlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. She began writing in 2004, during the height of the HIV crisis in South Africa, as a way to process what she witnessed. Kopano holds a medical degree from the University of Cape Town and a PhD in Population Health from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. She co-founded the Waiting Room Education by Medical Students (WREM), which educates patients in clinic waiting areas, and has received numerous honors, including the Tutu Fellowship and Aspen Institute’s New Voices Fellowship. She co-founded Ona-Mtoto-Wako, an initiative for antenatal care in rural areas, which won the 2015 Aspen Idea Award. Kopano currently serves as Executive Director of Grow Great, a campaign to eliminate child stunting in South Africa by 2030, and is also the founder of the Transitions Foundation, supporting youth empowerment through education.
