Paul Elie of Farrar Straus & Giroux secured North American rights to Zakes Mda's memoirs, closing the deal with Isobel Dixon on the Saturday before the Frankfurt Book Fair. The acclaimed South African playwright and novelist is published in many countries around the world, but Paul Elie of FSG and paperback partner Picador have been the most consistent publishers of Mda's extensive prose oeuvre. They have published everything from the novella SHE PLAYS WITH THE DARKNESS to CION, in which the professional mourner, Toloki (who features in WAYS OF DYING) goes to the US. In South Africa Mda is published by Penguin, who will soon bring out his latest novel BLACK DIAMOND.

Like Toloki, Zakes Mda now also has a US life - he is Professor of Creative Writing and Literary Theory at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. He returns regularly to 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. He is also a Founder and Trustee of the Southern African Multimedia AIDS Program and has been dramaturge at the Market Theatre. His novels have won a number of awards, including the M-Net Prize, the Sanlam Prize and the Olive Schreiner Prize in South Africa, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Africa Region and the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award in the US.

This vivid, candid memoir will be both the fascinating personal journey of an artist, but also a valuable work of social and political history, peppered with names of extraordinary figures in South Africa's past and present. Zakes Mda's father was a lawyer and activist, a founder member of the ANC Youth League and Mda remembers Nelson Mandela fetching him and his twin brothers from Johannesburg's Park Station - just one of many prominent names in the anti-apartheid struggle that will feature in this account. Just as fascinating are the details of rural village life, and the growing pains of the artist as a young man.

The book most recently published in the US, CION is the University of Ohio's 'Common Reader' for 2008-2010. The Common Reader is a book that is read campus-wide by students of all disciplines. Read more on the CION blog here.

More praise for CION:

'In this daring effort, Mda brings South Africa and the land where he teaches, the United States, together - CRY THE BELOVED COUNTRY meets BELOVED.'

-- The Philadelphia Inquirer

'Mda is at his matchless best...an essential companion piece to such 20th century masterpieces as Faulkner's ABSALOM, ABSALOM! and Toni Morrison's BELOVED and SONG OF SOLOMON...A great African writer's great American novel. A stunning book.'

-- Starred Kirkus Review

Praise for Zakes Mda:

'Mda writes from the inside with a rare combination of passion and truth that will connect with readers everywhere.' 

-- Booklist

'A voice for which one should feel not only affection but admiration.' 

-- The New York Times

'In novel after novel, Zakes Mda seems to have cultivated a mode of writing in which the realistic and the magical co-exist with unruffled ease.'

-- Harry Garuba, Independent

'Zakes Mda is among the most acclaimed exponents of a new artistic freedom. His fiction has a beguiling lyricism and humour, revelling in the beauty of aloe-covered mountains or Cape marine life.'

-- Maya Jaggi, The Guardian