Pepita Mwanga

I'm Pepita Mwanga – spoken word poet, voiceover artist, international development practitioner, and lawyer. That is a lot, I know. Welcome to my world.

As a poet, my work sits on the overlap of the personal and the political. Womanhood, identity, migration, mental health, social justice – I write about the stuff that keeps me up at night, and I do it moving between English and Swahili, because some things only make sense in one or the other. I'm the proud holder of an Arts Council England "Global Talent with Exceptional Promise" endorsement (yes, that's a real thing, and yes, I still can't say it without smiling a bit) and was a Creative Edinburgh Awards 2025 finalist. Edinburgh.

I've performed at the Scottish Parliament's Young Women and Democracy Summit , the United Nations Foundation, the Tanzanian High Commission in London, and the Edinburgh Fringe. My poem ‘The Time is Now’ was selected for the inaugural 2026 Shasha Choral Project, which pairs African artists with composers to turn words into new choral music. Hearing your poem sung back at you is a genuinely surreal experience, one I'd recommend to every poet at least once.

Off stage, I founded Siku Zote, running poetry workshops for young girls in Tanzanian orphanages, using poetry as a way into conversations about menstrual health that don't always get had otherwise.

Poetry, for me, isn't a performance I step into and out of. It's just how I process being alive.

Being a voiceover artist has always been a childhood dream, it's more fun than it is work, honestly. I've had the pleasure of working with companies like Vodacom Tanzania, Plan International, and Kijiweni Productions, where the short film Mozizi won the Ousmane Sembène Award (Best African Short Film) at the 2021 Zanzibar International Film Festival.

If you don't find me on the stage or in a studio, I'm putting my degrees to good use in my day job at the Edinburgh College of Arts as Project Manager for the New Real centre and Engagement Lead for the Doing AI Differently project – centring arts and humanities in the development of AI systems to build more interpretive technologies.

I told you it was a lot. But what a privilege, to get to do it all