Author
Zakes Mdluli
Durban storyteller. Cinematic, assured, unafraid of the dark. South African editions of the world's boldest fiction.
About Zakes Mdluli
Zakes Mdluli is the editor's hand behind No Safe Word's South African editions — full-length international novels retold so they belong here. Not summarised, not sanitised, and never trimmed: the same book, the same length, the same heat, moved onto streets you have actually driven down.
A Zakes edition swaps the diner for the Spur and the county fair for the Rand Show, but it does far more than change the place names. Rent is quoted in rand. The weather is the weather we actually get, so a cold walk in July becomes a Durban southwester coming in sideways. Money moves by EFT, not by cheque. Characters arrive with names their grannies would recognise, and they speak the way people speak — a little English, a little isiZulu, exactly as much as the moment calls for.
He works mostly in Durban, where he lives: Umhlanga's glass balconies, the warehouse bars off Station Drive, a back cottage in Westville with the washing line still up. Every edition he publishes is paired with custom illustrations, so the people you fall for on the page finally look like home.
Writing Philosophy
A great story does not stop being great when it crosses a border — it just stops being yours. My job is to give it back. I do not soften a book to make it polite here, and I do not shrink it to make it easy. If the original was blunt, my edition is blunt. If it ran to ninety thousand words, so does mine. What changes is everything a South African reader would otherwise have to translate in their head: the money, the weather, the food, the names, the way a family argues in a back garden on a Saturday morning. Get those right and the book stops being set somewhere else. It is set here, and it always should have been.
Stories by Zakes Mdluli
ZASHA HOUSE PART 3
A black envelope every morning, a new experience every night — and Nomsa is about to discover exactly how far she'll go at Zasha House's coastal retreat.
ZASHA HOUSE PART 2
Kagiso booked the Lodge to give his new wife a honeymoon she'd never forget. He just didn't expect to be watching when she found out what she really wanted.
ZASHA HOUSE PART 1
Mandla booked the resort to fix a marriage that had gone quiet. Standing on his side of the wall, listening to his wife come apart for a stranger, he finds something better than a fix.