Mia Couto
A biologist by training, he became one of Mozambique's most celebrated novelists while still tracking wildlife
Mia Couto was born in Beira, Mozambique, to Portuguese immigrant parents, and began writing poetry as a teenager during the last years of colonial rule. He left medical studies to work as a journalist covering the independence struggle and the early years of the new Mozambican state, running state news agencies through a period of civil war and enormous upheaval.
He later trained as a biologist, and for most of his working life he has combined fiction writing with fieldwork, studying coastal ecosystems and wildlife conservation across Mozambique. He has said the two callings feed each other, that observing an ecosystem closely and observing a sentence closely require the same patience.
His fiction, beginning with the story collection Voices Made Night and the novel Sleepwalking Land, bent the rules of Portuguese grammar to carry the rhythms of Mozambican speech and folklore, blending myth, war and everyday life. Sleepwalking Land was later named by a panel of African writers and scholars among the best African novels of the twentieth century.
Couto has won the Camoes Prize, the highest honour in Portuguese-language literature, and the Neustadt International Prize. He continues to publish novels regularly and still works part time as an environmental consultant, moving between laboratory reports and fiction in the same working week.