António Emílio Leite Couto, better known asMia Couto (born 5 July 1955),[1] is a Mozambican writer.[2] He won theCamões Prize in 2013, the most important literary award in the Portuguese language, and theNeustadt International Prize for Literature in 2014.
Mia Couto was born on 5 July 1955 inBeira, Mozambique, the country's third largest city, where he was also raised and schooled. He is the son ofPortuguese emigrants who moved to the Portuguese colony in the 1950s. When he was 14 years old, some of his poetry was published in a local newspaper,Notícias da Beira. Three years later, in 1971, he moved to the capital Lourenço Marques (nowMaputo) and began to study medicine at theUniversity of Lourenço Marques. During this time, the anti-colonial guerrilla and political movementFRELIMO was struggling to overthrow the Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique.[citation needed]
In April 1974, after theCarnation Revolution in Lisbon and the overthrow of theEstado Novo regime, Mozambique was about to become an independent republic. In 1974, FRELIMO asked Couto to suspend his studies for a year to work as a journalist forTribuna until September 1975 and then as the director of the newly created Mozambique Information Agency (AIM). Later, he ranTempo magazine until 1981. His first book of poems,Raiz de Orvalho, was published in 1983; it included texts aimed against the dominance of Marxist militant propaganda.[3] Couto continued working for the newspaperNotícias until 1985 when he resigned to finish his course of study in biology.
Couto is considered one of the most important writers in Mozambique; his works have been published in more than 20 countries and in various languages.[citation needed] In many of his texts, he undertakes to recreate the Portuguese language by infusing it with regional vocabulary and structures from Mozambique, thus producing a new model for the African narrative. Stylistically, his writing is influenced bymagical realism, a movement popular in modernLatin American literatures, and his use of language is reminiscent of the Brazilian writerJoão Guimarães Rosa, but also deeply influenced by thebaiano writerJorge Amado. He has been noted for creatingproverbs, sometimes known as "improverbs", in his fiction, as well as riddles, legends, and metaphors, giving his work a poetic dimension.[4]
An international jury at theZimbabwe International Book Fair named his first novel,Sleepwalking Land, one of the best 12 African books of the 20th century. In 2007, he became the first African author to win the prestigiousLatin Union literary prize, which has been awarded annually in Italy since 1990. Mia Couto became only the fourth writer in the Portuguese language to take home this prestigious award. Currently, he is a biologist employed by theGreat Limpopo Transfrontier Park while continuing his work on other writing projects.[citation needed]
^Coutinho, Maria João. 2008. "The heart is a beach: proverbs and improverbs in Mia Couto's stories".Proceedings of the First Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Proverbs, eds Rui. J. B. Soares and Outi Lauhakangas, 484–489.
Cunha, Maria Salete. "Entre capulanas e silêncios: as mulheres em A confissão da leoa e Jesusalém de Mia Couto." (2018).
de Araújo Teixeira, Eduardo. "O provérbio nas estórias de Guimarães Rosa e Mia Couto."Navegações 8, no. 1 (2015): 57–63.
Hamilton, Grant and David Paul Huddart. 2016.A Companion to Mia Couto. Boydell & Brewer.
Hooper, Myrtle J., and Isabel B. Rawlins. "Mia Couto and the enchantment of rain."Literator (Potchefstroom. Online) 46, no. 1 (2025): 1-8.
Van Haesendonck, Kristian. "Mia Couto’s Postcolonial Epistemology: Animality in Confession of the Lioness (A Confissão da leoa)."ZOOPHILOLOGICA. Polish Journal of Animal Studies 5 (2019): 297–308.
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