In 2014 he received the ,50,000 Neustadt Prize for Literature, and in 2015 he was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. In 2007 he was the first African author to win the Latin Union Award for Romance Languages in 2013 he was awarded the 100,000 Camoes Prize for Literature, in recognition of his life s work. He now lives in Maputo where he works as an environmental biologist and heads the Mozambique side of the Limpopo Transnational Park.

Written in 1992, Mia Couto s first novel is a powerful indictment of the suffering war brings.īorn in 1955 in Mozambique, Mia Couto ran the AIM news agency during the revolutionary struggle. As the boy reads the story to his elderly companion, this story and their own develop in tandem. Among the effects of a dead passenger, they come across a set of notebooks that tell of his life. Doris LessingĪs the civil war rages in 1980s Mozambique, an old man and a young boy, refugees from the war, seek shelter in a burnt-out bus. Quite unlike anything else I have read from Africa. The most prominent of the younger generation of writers in Portuguese-speaking Africa, Couto passionately and sensitively describes everyday life in poverty-stricken Mozambique. 'The New York Times Book Review' on 'The Last Flight of the Flamingo'

On almost every page of this witty magical realist whodunit, we sense Couto s delight on those places where language slips officialdom s asphyxiating grasp. Mia Couto's first novel, judged one of the twelve best African books of the 20th century

Hollow City by Ransom Riggs