Photo by Victor Dlamini
Zakes Mda is a prolific novelist, playwright and filmmaker who has received numerous awards, including the M-Net Book Prize for his monumental novel Ways of Dying, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa and the Sunday Times Fiction Prize for The Heart of Redness. He also received the Zora Neal Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award in 2003. He commutes between the USA, where he is a Professor of Creative Writing and Literary Theory at Ohio University, and South Africa, where he runs a beekeeping project in the Eastern Cape, and a dramaturge at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg. He is Founder and Trustee of the Southern African Multimedia AIDS Trust in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, where he trains HIV positive people to write. Mda’s novels, The Heart of Redness, won the 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize, Africa Region, and the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. Ways of Dying won the Olive Schreiner and M-Net Book Prizes, 1997, and has since been adapted into a play, a jazz opera and a Broadway production. His other novels include Black Diamond, 2009, Cion 2007, The Whale Caller, 2005, and The Madonna of Excelsior, 2002.
help2read is very excited to have such an inspiring person as our ambassador!
