Lorato Trok

Lorato is an early literacy expert in developing reading for pleasure books for young children. She has more than 20 years’ experience in publishing, writing, editing, translation and story development in children’s and young adults’ literature. She is a creative writing facilitator and has facilitated multilingual writing workshops in South Africa, Zambia, Lesotho, Swaziland, Kenya and the United States for teachers, students, writers and librarians. She is also an award winning translator and editor. In 2020 she won an IBBY award for best translation for Sindiwe Magona’s The Best Meal Ever.

Lorato has presented papers locally and internationally on children’s literature. In February 2005 she was invited to help launch the “Reading Africa” program at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library, Washington, D.C for children.

She was twice (2017, 2020) awarded the Association of Non-Fiction and Academic Authors of South Africa (ANFASA), writing grant to write young adult non-fiction biographies of Rosina Sedibane Modiba, South Africa’s first Black female athlete to compete against white female athletes during the apartheid years and set multiple records and The Forgotten Scientist: The Story of Saul Sithole, about the untold story of a pioneering Black scientist who made a great contribution to the fields of anthropology and ornithology in South Africa during apartheid.