The Forgotten Scientist: The Story of Saul Sithole

Lorato Trok has more than 10 years’ experience in publishing, writing and story development in children’s literature. Lorato is a qualified teacher and librarian who started her career working at Robert Moffat Library in her hometown of Kuruman, Northern Cape for four years.

Lorato was also a project coordinator at the Centre for the Book in Cape Town, a project of the National Library of South Africa for the award winning (IBBY 2004) First Words in Print project for four years, a project where children’s stories were created with input from publishers in all 11 official South African languages and distributed across the country to homes and schools.

In 2005 Lorato was invited to help launch the Reading Africa reading program at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library, Washington, D.C. to celebrate Black History Month. Lorato worked as a publishing programme manager for six years at Room to Read South Africa, an American-based INGO. One of the books she published for Room to Read won a prestigious UNICEF Best ECD publication in 2011//2012. She was also an editor and project manager, Schools Publishing at Oxford University Press.

For four years she was a South Africa, Lesotho and Zambia country coordinator for the African Storybook Initiative, a digital publishing platform for children’s stories across Africa. She has contributed a number of stories in English and Setswana on the website and translated more than 100 children’s stories in Setswana. She is a published author and in 2017 published a children’s story book, Mogau’s Gift through Book Dash. She has also published two children’s story books through Room to Read South Africa.

She holds qualifications in Languages and Literature (Majoring in Creative Writing) and Advanced Editing. She has presented papers locally and internationally on children’s literature. Lorato is a creative writing facilitator and has facilitated writing workshops in South Africa, Zambia, Lesotho, Swaziland, Kenya and the United States for teachers, learners, aspiring writers and librarians.

In December 2017, Association of Non-Fiction and Academic Authors of South Africa (ANFASA) awarded Lorato a writing grant to write a biography of Rosina Sedibane Modiba, South Africa’s first Black athlete to compete against white athletes during the apartheid years and set multiple records.