Eminent South African writer, painter, composer and film-maker, Zakes Mda, will be among the star acts appearing at this year's annual Time of the Writer literary festival, together with Uwem Akpan, author of the Oprah Book Club choice SAY YOU'RE ONE OF THEM. The festival aims to promote and nurture a culture of reading, writing and creative expression and will feature new and established authors from South Africa and elsewhere on the South African continent. It will be held at Kwa-Zulu Natal University from 9-13 March 2010. For more information about the Time of the Writer festival see here

Zakes Mda now 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. He is the writer of six novels and four plays, and is currently working on his memoirs, SOMETIMES THERE IS A VOID, to be published by Penguin South Africa and Farrar Straus & Giroux in North America.

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