Mia Couto was born in 1955 in Mozambique and is the most prominent writer in Portuguese-speaking Africa. He has been active as a journalist and for several years headed the AIM news agency in Maputo. He now lives in Maputo where he works as an environmental biologist.

  • Every Man Is A Race (African Writers Series)

    ‘A man’s story is always badly told. That’s because a person never stops being born. Nobody leads one sole life, we are all multiplied into different and ever-changeable men.’ So it is with all the stories in this collection, which never make a definitive judgement on the individual life, but only suggest its possibilities.Set in Mozambique, the stories reflect the legacy of Portuguese colonialism and the tragedy of the subsequent civil war.Mia Couto’s first collection, Voices Made Night, was described as ‘lyrical’, ‘magical’ and ‘compassionate’ by the reviewers, who were unanimous in identifying a significant new talent from the continent. This volume confirms that judgement.

  • Voices Made Night (African Writers Series)

    In this collection of stories, the Mozambican poet, Mia Couto, expresses, through striking poetic metaphors, the emptiness and absurdity of lives bound by poverty and subject to arbitrary incursions of extreme violence. The frustrated longing of the lipless snake catcher who surrounds his lady’s house with snakes; or the man who fears his wife is a witch and scalds her with boiling water, are caught in dual tension. In Voices Made Night, an African cosmology portrays a surreal world defined by its contradictions, set against a background of political instability.

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