Publications:

When People Play People: Development Communication through Theatre, Zed Books, London, 1993

Ways of Dying, Oxford University Press: Cape Town, 1995 (Picador: USA , 2002)

She Plays with the Darkness, Vivlia, 1995

Melville 67, Vivlia, 1998

The Heart of Redness, Oxford University Press, 2000

The Madonna of Excelsior, Oxford University Press, 2002

Plays:

We Shall Sing for the Fatherland, Ravan Press, 1980

The Plays of Zakes Mda, Ravan Press, 1990

And the Girls in their Sunday Dresses, Witwatersrand University Press, 1993

Four Plays, Vivlia, 1996

Let us Play, Vivlia, 1998

Fools, Bells and the Habit of Eating , Wits University Press, 2002

Poetry:

Bits of Debris, Thapama Books, Lesotho, 1986

ZAKES MDA

South Africa

Prolific playwright, poet, journalist, painter, and author, Zakes Mda presently commutes between the USA (where he is Professor of Creative Writing and Literary Theory at Ohio University ) and South Africa , where he runs a number of community projects and playwriting workshops. As a professional beekeeper he is Founder and Trustee of the Lower Telle Beekeepers Collective Trust in the Eastern Cape , which is why bees feature so prominently in some of his novels. Zakes Mda is Founder and Trustee of the Southern African Multimedia AIDS Program where he trains HIV positive people to write. Their stories are soon to be published in an anthology, and then adapted into stage plays, radio and video drama, for performance by community theatre groups and radio stations. Involved in AIDS education since 1985, Zakes has produced many stage and television dramas and comic books on the subject. Since 1996 Mda has been Director of Thapama Productions cc, a film and television production company and is engaged in a number of local and international co-productions. Zakes Mda studied and worked in South Africa , Lesotho , the U.K. and U.S.A. and now devotes his time to writing and teaching.

Mda has won numerous accolades, not least the 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize, Africa Region, for The Heart of Redness, and the Olive Schreiner and M-Net Book Prizes for Ways of Dying which has since been adapted into a play, a jazz opera and a Broadway production. This award-winning playwright is now consumed with a passion for writing novels and can't keep pace with the story ideas in his head. His forthcoming novel, entitled The Whale Caller, set in Hermanus, is due for release at the end of 2004.

Of his writing process Mda says “As I am writing my current novels I am already accumulating notes for the next one. Most of my stories are suggested to me by the place ... the setting ... I take my time to build my major characters, long before there is any story for them. The story is therefore the last thing in my writing process, emerging as a result of the interaction of the characters and the place… I never worry about the plot because it works itself out from who the characters are and what their physical, social and political environments are.”