Mia Couto

António Emílio Leite Couto , better known as Mia Couto, is a world-renowned Mozambican writer. Couto was born in the city of Beira, Mozambique’s second largest city, where he was also raised and schooled. He is the son of Portuguese emigrants who moved to the former Portuguese colony in the 1950s. At the age of fourteen, some of his poetry was published in a local newspaper, Notícias da Beira. Three years later, in 1971, he moved to the capital Lourenço Marques and began to study medicine at the University of Lourenço Marques. During this time, the... anti-colonial guerrilla and political movement FRELIMO was struggling to overthrow the Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique. In April 1974, after the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon and the overthrow of the Estado Novo regime, Mozambique was about to become an independent republic. In 1974, FRELIMO asked Couto to suspend his studies for a year to work as a journalist for Tribuna until September 1975 and then as the director of the newly-created Mozambique Information Agency . Later, he ran the Tempo magazine until 1981.
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