Mia Couto – författare

Longlisted for the 2024 Dublin Literary AwardThe scintillating conclusion to the critically acclaimed historical saga: the Jan Michalski Prize–winning Sands of the Emperor trilogy.“[Couto’s] life has been woven into the history of the nation, and he has become the foremost chronicler of Mozambique’s antiheroes: its women, its peasants, even its dead.” —Jacob Judah, The New York TimesIn The Drinker of Horizons, the award-winning author Mia Couto brings the epic love story between a young Mozambican woman named Imani and the Portuguese sergeant Germano de Melo to its moving close. We resume where The Sword and the Spear concluded: While Germano is left behind in Africa, serving with the Portuguese military, Imani has been enlisted to act as the interpreter to the imprisoned emperor of Gaza, Ngungunyane, on the long voyage to Lisbon. For the emperor and his seven wives, it will be a journey of no return. Imani’s own return will come only after a decade-long odyssey through the Portuguese empire at the beginning of the twentieth century. If history is always narrated by the victors, in The Drinker of Horizons, Couto performs an act of restorative justice, giving a voice to those silenced by the horrors of colonialism. Throughout, Couto’s language astonishes, rendering with utter clarity the beauty and terror of war and love, and revealing the devastation of a profoundly unequal encounter between cultures.

The first in a trilogy about the last emperor of southern Mozambique by one of Africa’s most important writersSouthern Mozambique, 1894. Sergeant Germano de Melo is posted to the village of Nkokolani to oversee the Portuguese conquest of territory claimed by Ngungunyane, the last of the leaders of the state of Gaza, the second-largest empire led by an African. Ngungunyane has raised an army to resist colonial rule and with his warriors is slowly approaching the border village. Desperate for help, Germano enlists Imani, a fifteen-year-old girl, to act as his interpreter. She belongs to the VaChopi tribe, one of the few who dared side with the Portuguese. But while one of her brothers fights for the Crown of Portugal, the other has chosen the African emperor. Standing astride two kingdoms, Imani is drawn to Germano, just as he is drawn to her. But she knows that in a country haunted by violence, the only way out for a woman is to go unnoticed, as if made of shadows or ashes. Alternating between the voices of Imani and Germano, Mia Couto’s Woman of the Ashes combines vivid folkloric prose with extensive historical research to give a spellbinding and unsettling account of war-torn Mozambique at the end of the nineteenth century.

The second novel in the exhilarating Sands of the Emperor trilogy, following the Man Booker International Prize finalist Woman of the AshesMozambique, 1895. After an attack on his quarters, the defeated Portuguese sergeant Germano de Melo needs to be taken to the hospital. The only one within reach is along the river Inhambane, so his lover Imani undertakes an arduous rescue mission, accompanied by her father and brother. Meanwhile, war rages between the Portuguese occupiers and Ngungunyane’s warriors—battles waged with sword and spear, until the arrival of a devastating new weapon destined to secure European domination. Germano wants to start a new life with Imani, but the Portuguese military has other plans for the injured soldier. And Imani''s father has his own plan for his daughter’s future: as one of Ngungunyane''s wives, she would be close enough to the tyrant to avenge the destruction of their village.With elegance and compassion, Mia Couto''s The Sword and the Spear illustrates the futility of war and the porous boundaries between apparently foreign cultures—boundaries of which entire societies, but also friends and lovers, conceive as simultaneously insuperable and in decline.

"One of the greatest living writers in the Portuguese language."—Philip Graham, The Millions

What would Barack Obama''s 2004 campaign have looked like if it unfolded in an African nation? What does it mean to be an African writer today? How do writers and poets from all continents teach us to cross the sertão, the savannah, the barren places where we''re forced to walk within ourselves? Bringing together the best pieces from his previously untranslated nonfiction collections, alongside new material presented here for the first time in any language, Pensativities offers English readers a taste of Mia Couto as essayist, lecturer, and journalist—with essays on cosmopolitanism, poverty, culture gaps, conservation, and more.

After the war, I thought all that was left was ashes, hollow ruins . . . Today, I know that’s not true. Where man remains, a seed, too, survives, a dream to inseminate time.

Published in the aftermath of Mozambique’s bloody civil war, Mia Couto’s third collection seeks out the places violence could not reach, the places where, the author writes, “every man is the same: pretending he’s here, dreaming of going away, and plotting his return.” Shifting masterfully between forms—creation tale to meditation, playful comedy to magical twist—these stories grapple with questions of what’s been lost and what can be reclaimed, what future exists for a country that broke the yoke of colonialism only to descend into internecine war, what is Mozambican and what is Mozambique. Following fishermen and fortune-tellers, widows and drunks, and one errant hippopotamus, this new translation of stories by the Man Booker-listed author of Confession of the Lioness rediscovers possibility and what it means to be reborn.

style="text-align: left;">Finalist for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize

style="text-align: left;">Winner of the Neustadt Prize for Literature, 2014

style="text-align: left;">Winner of the Camões Prize for Literature, 2013

A Vanity Fair Must-Read Book From Around The World for Winter 2019

A Financial Times Summer Book of 2019

An NPR Best Book of 2021

New and selected fiction, over half in English for the first time, from the winner of the 2014 Neustadt Prize.

Known internationally for his novels, Neustadt Prize-winner Mia Couto first became famous for his short stories. Sea Loves Me includes sixty-four of his best, thirty-six of which appear in English for the first time. Covering the entire arc of Couto''s career, this collection displays the Mozambican author''s inventiveness, sensitivity, and social range with greater richness than any previous collection—from early stories that reflect the harshness of life under Portuguese colonialism; to magical tales of rural Africa; to contemporary fables of the fluidity of race and gender, environmental disaster, and the clash between the countryside and the city. The title novella, long acclaimed as one of Couto''s best works but never before available in English, caps this collection with the lyrical story of a search for a lost father that leads unexpectedly to love.