Zakes Mda

(Herschel, Zuid-Afrika, 1948) is a playwright, writer, academic, painter, filmer and one of the most important novellists in South Africa. At birth he was named as Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda, but his street friends in Soweto called him Zakes. He studied in the U.S.A., Great Britain, Lesotho and Capetown. His first collection of poems Bits of Debris appeared in 1986 and his first novella Ways of Dying appeared in 1995. Presently Zakes Mda commutes between Johannesburg, where he works as a dramatist, and Ohio, where he works as a tutor of English/creative writing. With his novel Het rode hart (The red heart)(2002) Mda won the Commonwealth Writers Prize Africa Regions and the South African Sunday Times Fiction Award. The Dutch translation of Ways of dying will be published in the spring of 2004 by De Geus publishers.
WIN2003