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|
The
2004 Award
|
|
The
Madonna of Excelsior
by Zakes Mda |
Nominated by:
Publisher
of Nominated Edition:
|
| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors |
|
ABOUT
THE BOOK
|
| The
background is the notorious 1971 case in which nineteen citizens of Excelsior
in the Free State were charged with breaking apartheid's Immorality Act,
which forbade sex between black and white. In an extraordinary alchemy of
words into art, Mda tells the story of a family at the heart of the scandal
- of Niki, the fallen madonna, Popi, her daughter by an eminent white citizen
of the town, and Viliki, the betrayed son, and of how they come to terms
with the repercussions and find resolution in surprising ways. By turns earthy, witty and tragic, this energetic novel deftly handles issues of racial identity, rape and revenge. It is also a brilliantly observed study of the inner workings of small-town South Africa, and the changes rural communities have undergone. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
| Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda, better known as Zakes Mda, is one of southern Africa's foremost writers of both fiction and drama. He is also an internationally recognised painter, poet and academic. Born in the Eastern Cape in 1948, Mda has studied and worked in South Africa, Lesotho, The United Kingdom and the United States. He now devotes his time to writing and teaching. He is the author of three previous novels, She Plays with the Darkness (1995), Ways of Dying, which won the M-Net Book Prize in 1997 and The Heart of Redness (2000), which was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2002 and won the Sunday Times Fiction Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Africa region in 2001. |
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