LITTLE SUNS

Master storyteller Mda, intertwines an unusual love story with little-told history

Rickety old wanderer Malangana (‘Little Suns') makes his way on an epic mission, searching for his lost love Mthwakazi, a Bushman healer who once tended his clan's Queen. He was parted from her during The Wars
of Hope – the real-life 19th Century battles between Xhosa tribes and British colonial rulers after the murder of Magistrate Hamilton Hope.

Decades later, as the trail goes hot and cold, Malangana also tracks the history of his people's uprising, humiliation and exile. After these frontier wars, Zakes Mda's own ancestors were sent into exile to Lesotho and in LITTLE SUNS he has drawn on published history and the oral stories of family members and the region's praise poets, all blended with his uniquely vigorous prose, historical insight and humour.

Writer, painter, composer and film maker. He commutes between South Africa and the U.S., as professor of creative writing at Ohio University, patron of the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, and a director of the
Southern African Multimedia AIDS Trust. He was awarded the South African silver Order of Ikhamanga, for excellence in arts and culture.

Zakes Mda has won numerous accolades and prizes. His classic novels THE HEART OF REDNESS and WAYS OF DYING are often cited as among South Africa's Top Ten novels of the last 20 years and have won
major prizes including the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Sunday Times Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Africa Region – for which THE WHALE CALLER and CION were also shortlisted. His novel RACHEL'S BLUE won the University of Johannesburg Prize in 2015.