Mia Couto

Couto was born in Mozambique's port city of Beira to Portuguese immigrant parents, and dropped out of medical school to join the FRELIMO movement fighting for independence, working afterward as a journalist and, later, a practicing biologist specializing in coastal ecology. He wrote his first fiction in the years just after independence and through Mozambique's long, brutal civil war, bending standard Portuguese with invented words and rural idiom drawn from the languages around him.

Sleepwalking Land, published in 1992 as that civil war was ending, follows an old man and a boy wandering a landscape stripped bare by fighting, reading a dead man's notebooks whose stories bleed into their own reality. A Mozambican readers' poll later named it one of the twelve best African books of the twentieth century. Couto has continued to publish widely translated fiction while working as an environmental scientist, dividing his time between writing and fieldwork.