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Zakes Mda

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Biography

Zakes Mda is the pen name of Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda. He is a South African, Lesotho and Appalachian American-African writer, painter, and music composer. He holds an MFA (Theatre) and an MA (Telecommunications) from Ohio University, and a PhD from the University of Cape Town. There have been recent successful exhibitions of his work in the US and South Africa and his paintings are bought by collectors around the world. He has published more than twenty books, ten of which are novels and the rest collections of plays, poetry and a monograph on the theory and practice of theatre-for-development. His novel CION, set in southeast Ohio, was nominated for the NAACP Image Award. His memoir SOMETIMES THERE IS A VOID: MEMOIRS OF AN OUTSIDER was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux and was a New York Times Notable Book for 2012. He has won many prestigious literary awards in South Africa. He divides his time between the USA and South Africa. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio University, lecturer in Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins University and Extraordinary Professor of English at the University of the Western Cape. In South Africa he is a patron of the Market Theatre and director of the Southern African Multimedia AIDS Trust. He also runs a beekeeping project he established in 2000 with rural women of the Eastern Cape and is a director of NeoZane, a publishing house and animation film production company in Johannesburg.

News / Ranking / Titbits / Awards

1978: Amstel Playwright of the Year Award, special merit award for We Shall Sing for the Fatherland. 1979: Amstel Playwright of the Year Award, winner for The Hill. 1997: M-Net Book Prize, Ways of Dying. 2001: Commonwealth Writers’ Prize: Africa, The Heart of Redness. 2001: Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, The Heart of Redness. 2001: Sunday Times Fiction Prize, The Heart of Redness. 2004: Top Ten South African Books published in the Decade of Democracy, The Madonna of Excelsior. 2017: Barry Ronge Fiction Prize, Little Suns.

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