Zakes Mda is a South African writer, painter and music composer. He has published nineteen books, nine of which are novels and the rest collections of plays (including the anthologies And the Girls in their Sunday Dresses and Fools, Bells and the Habit of Eating); poetry, a monograph on the theory and practice of theatre-for-development, and an autobiography titled Sometimes ... Read morethere is a Void: Memoirs of an Outsider. His books have been translated into twenty languages and have won a number of awards, including the Amstel Playwright of the Year Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the M-Net Prize, the Sunday Times Literary Prize, the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award and the American Library Association Notable Book. He commutes between America and South Africa, working as a Professor of Creative Writing at Ohio University, a beekeeper in the Eastern Cape, and as Director of the Southern African Multimedia AIDS Trust in Sophiatown, Johannesburg. He is also a Patron of the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. Show Less