Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni "Zakes" Mda was born on 1948 and is a South African novelist, poet and playwright.
13 Facts About Zakes Mda
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Zakes Mda has won major South African and British literary awards for his novels and plays.
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Zanemvula Mda was born in Herschel, South Africa, in 1948.
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Zakes Mda pursued his BFA at the International Academy of Arts and Literature, Zurich, Switzerland, in 1976.
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Zakes Mda completed a MFA and a MA in 1984 at Ohio University, United States.
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Zakes Mda completed his PhD at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, in 1989.
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Zakes Mda has been a visiting professor at Yale University and the University of Vermont.
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At the 2024 "Time of the Writer" festival in Durban, Zakes Mda delivered the keynote address, titled "Reflections, Resonance and Revival".
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Zakes Mda dramatizes the uncertain future of a culture whose troubled relationship with the colonizing force of Empire, as well as their own civil factions, threatens to extinguish their home of Qolorha-by-Sea.
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Zakes Mda writes from inside the exile's ambiguous fate, acknowledging that the uprooted life brings new perspectives but at the cost of a haunting fear of inner incoherence.
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Yet, as his autobiography discloses, on the stage and on the page Zakes Mda has found a different kind of continuity through the steadying presence of imaginative belonging.
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On 8 June 2012, Zakes Mda was awarded an honorary doctorate of the University of Cape Town for his contributions to world literature.
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Zakes Mda's novels have been translated into 21 languages, including the translation of Ways of Dying into Turkish.