Thinkers Timeline

Mia Couto is a Mozambican novelist, poet, and biologist, the most internationally recognised living Mozambican writer. He was born António Emílio Leite Couto in 1955 in Beira, the second-largest city in what was then Portuguese-ruled Mozambique. His parents were Portuguese settlers; his father was a poet and journalist. The family was unusual among white settlers in their sympathy for the Mozambican African majority. The boy who became Mia took his nickname as a child, asking his family to call him 'Mia' because he so loved cats. He was 19 when Mozambique gained independence in 1975. He had begun studying medicine at the University of Lourenço Marques, but abandoned medicine after independence to work as a journalist for the new revolutionary state. He served as director of the Mozambican Information Agency, the daily Notícias, and the magazine Tempo during the early years of independence and the brutal civil war (1977-1992). He returned to university in his thirties and earned a degree in biology. He continues to work as an environmental consultant and ecologist alongside his literary career. His first book, a poetry collection, appeared in 1983. His first novel, Terra Sonâmbula (Sleepwalking Land), appeared in 1992 and was later named one of the twelve best African novels of the twentieth century. He has since written more than thirty books in many genres. He won the Camões Prize, the highest honour in Portuguese-language literature, in 2013, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, sometimes called the 'American Nobel', in 2014. He was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize in 2015. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He still lives in Maputo.