Mia Couto
António Emílio Leite Couto, better known as Mia Couto, is a Mozambican writer.
After studying medicine and biology, Couto worked as a journalist and headed several Mozambican national newspapers and magazines. He lives in Maputo, where he works as a biologist. His works have been published in more than 20 countries and in various languages, including Portuguese, English, French, German, Czech, Italian, Serbian, Catalan, Estonian and Chinese.
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.
Couto won the Camões Prize in 2013, the most important literary award in the Portuguese language, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2014 and was also short-listed for the 2017 IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award.
He was shortlisted, for his entire body of work, for the Man Booker International Prize 2015.
Background
Between 2005 - 2015, the Man Booker International Prize recognised one writer for their achievement in fiction.
Worth £60,000, the prize was awarded every two years to a living author who had published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language.
The winner was chosen solely at the discretion of the judging panel and there were no submissions from publishers.
The Man Booker International Prize was different from the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that it highlighted one writer’s overall contribution to fiction on the world stage. In focusing on overall literary excellence, the judges considered a writer’s body of work rather than a single novel.