Mandla Langa comes from KwaMashu, Durban. He went into exile in 1976 and has lived in Botswana, Mozambique, Angola, Hungary, Zambia and the United Kingdom. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of the Witwatersrand. A recipient of honorary doctorates from the Universities of Fort Hare and Wits respectively, Mandla sits on various boards such as Multichoice’s Phuthuma Nathi and Datapost and is a trustee of Media Monitoring Africa.
In 1980 he won the Drum story contest for ‘The Dead Men Who Lost Their Bones’ and in 1991 he was awarded the Arts Council of Great Britain Bursary for creative writing, the first for a South African. Langa’s published works include Tenderness of Blood (1987), A Rainbow on a Paper Sky (1989), The Naked Song and Other Stories (1997), The Memory of Stones (2000), the award-winning The Lost Colours of the Chameleon (2008) and the bestselling The Texture of Shadows (2014). His most recent book is Lost Language of the Soul, published this year.
