Mia Couto | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Mia Couto at Fronteiras do Pensamento (2014) | |
| Born | António Emílio Leite Couto 5 July 1955 Beira, Mozambique |
| Occupation | Biologist and writer |
| Nationality | Mozambican |
| Period | Post-colonial Africa |
| Genre | Animist realism, historical fiction |
António Emílio Leite Couto, better known as Mia Couto (born 5 July 1955),[1] is a Mozambican writer. He won the Camões Prize in 2013, the most important literary award in the Portuguese language, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2014.
Mia Couto was born in the city of Beira, Mozambique, the country's third largest city, where he was also raised and schooled. He is the son of Portuguese 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 (now Maputo) and began to study medicine at the University of Lourenço Marques. During this time, the anti-colonial guerrilla and political movement FRELIMO was struggling to overthrow the Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique.[citation needed]
In April 1974, after the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon and the overthrow of the Estado 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 for Tribuna until September 1975 and then as the director of the newly created Mozambique Information Agency (AIM). Later, he ran Tempo 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.[2] Couto continued working for the newspaper Notícias 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 by magical realism, a movement popular in modern Latin American literatures, and his use of language is reminiscent of the Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa, but also deeply influenced by the baiano writer Jorge Amado. He has been noted for creating proverbs, sometimes known as "improverbs", in his fiction, as well as riddles, legends, and metaphors, giving his work a poetic dimension.[3]
An international jury at the Zimbabwe 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 prestigious Latin 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 the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park while continuing his work on other writing projects.[citation needed]
In 1998, Couto was elected into the Brazilian Academy of Letters, the first African writer to receive such an honour.[4]
