Mia Couto

Mia Couto is a Mozambican novelist and biologist born in 1955 in Beira. Born António Emílio Leite Couto, he is the most internationally celebrated Mozambican writer and one of the most important voices in African literature writing in Portuguese. He writes under the pen name Mia Couto, which he adopted in his youth. Couto's fiction is celebrated for its inventive use of language — creating new words, weaving together Portuguese with Bantu linguistic structures, and creating a prose style that feels both deeply African and distinctly his own. His major works include Vozes Anoitecidas (Voices Made Night, 1986), Terra Sonâmbula (Sleepwalking Land, 1992), considered one of the ten best African books of the twentieth century, and the Trilogy of Mozambique beginning with A Confissão da Leoa (Confession of the Lioness, 2012). He received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2014 and the Camões Prize in 1999. He works as a biologist for an environmental consultancy and maintains a deep connection between his literary and scientific interests, particularly in questions of ecology and the natural world of Mozambique. Couto is widely considered the greatest living writer of African Lusophone literature and a major figure in world literature.