It is clear that Mia Couto – the pen name of perhaps Mozambique's finest writer, António Emílio Leite Couto – is literally a prized writer. Winning his first award in 1985 for his debut collection of poetry, Raiz de orvalho (Root of Dew), Couto has gone on to win so many awards, prizes, and accolades for his writing that it is surprising that this significant voice in World literature is not better known to the English-speaking world. As Couto is the recipient of the Areosa Pena Annual Journalism Award (1987) and important literary prizes, such as the Mozambican National Prize for Literature (1993), the Mozambican National Foundation of Culture Award (1999), the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa (2001), the Africa Today Award (2003), and, most recently, the Camões Prize for Literature (2013) and the 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature (a prize commonly referred to as America's Nobel), his capacity to attract the attention of prize-givers might leave one slightly breathless, but it does so at the same time as leaving one in no doubt of his importance to the world of letters.

Born in the coastal city of Beira in 1955 to Portuguese immigrants escaping the repression of Salazar's ‘New State’, Mia Couto originally studied medicine before turning his attention to journalism and the communist anti-colonial guerrilla movement, FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique). In 1974 Couto officially gave up his studies in order to give voice to the FRELIMO movement through the newspaper A Tribuna. One year later Mozambique gained its political independence from Portugal, and the party that had turned to Couto to publicize its political agenda asked him to serve as the director of the National Information Agency – a post that he held for three years (1976–1979). However, Couto's evident need to be involved with the written word saw him return to journalism in 1979 in the capacity of editor for the weekly periodicals Tempo and Domingo, and later the daily newspaper, Jornal de Noticias. In fact, so strong was Couto's compulsion to write that during his time with these national publications he was also putting together his first collection of poetry.

The idea of World literature is currently enjoying something of a resurgence in academia. What do you think of it as a concept? Is it more helpful than other, perhaps more familiar forms of categorization, such as African literature or postcolonial literature?

As far as I am concerned, it's a step sideways rather than a step forward. Literature, like any other art form, has always been of the world. This apparently new category is a way of classifying the literature of the so-called ‘others’. But I believe that there is a process, albeit one without continuity, by which the arts from Africa, Asia and South America have been acknowledged. Works from these parts of the world are beginning to gain recognition through their quality, without the need for any other additional criterion of evaluation.

Undoubtedly, the ‘exotic’ accounts for some appeal of World literature – that is to say, the sense one has of reading about lands far away from one's own (even if those accounts are far from paradisiacal). Do you consciously look to capture or reflect this idea of the exotic by figuring specifically Mozambican elements in your fiction?

Writers always speak of ‘lands far away from one's own’. No matter how familiar an English writer may be with English reality, he eventually travels through a territory that is his own private terrain, with its mysteries and peculiarities. I write from Mozambique, and my first readers are Mozambicans. The ‘Mozambican’ components of my narratives are not motivated by any desire for exotic display or appeal.

Of course, World literature is intimately related to the art of translation. Indeed, most of your readers will have first encountered your work in translation. What are your thoughts on (the very possibility of) translation?

My experience has generally been very good. Translators do not only translate languages; they translate a voice, concretely, the voice of a given author. Their work is therefore not solely technical. It is essentially the work of a co-author. And that's how I work with translators, the assumption being that they are re-creating the book alongside me. The truth is that there is a poetic element in my prose that would not allow it to be done in any other way.

In an interview following the publication of his English-language edition of The Tuner of Silences (2012), Mia Couto asserts without hesitation that ‘the search for identity is the main issue in all of my books’ (Esposito 2013). True. But to an account of the important recursive concerns of Couto's prose fiction, one should perhaps also add language, the environment, war, the real, history, and, I would venture, trauma. Indeed, while themes such as identity, language, and war may be explicit in his writing, it is clear that Couto always arrives at these sites by having his characters first travel through a psychologically traumatic experience. Here one can think of Ermelindo in Under the Frangipani (2001), Muidinga in Sleepwalking Land (2006), and Abstinêncio in A River Called Time (2008). That being said, figures such as these also make clear the fact that although trauma is everywhere in Couto's writing, it has never been the subject of his sustained engagement. Put simply, for Couto, trauma has never been anything other than that which makes possible the stage upon which his chosen actors – identity, language, war, and so on – play.

For this very reason, then, The Tuner of Silences occupies a position of singular importance in Couto's oeuvre. It is the first work that Couto dedicates wholly to the question of trauma itself. Indeed, it is a novel that is concerned with not only understanding trauma, but also exploring possible ways of mitigating the condition. In consciously grappling with the many enigmatic qualities of trauma, it would appear that Couto is particularly interested in the act of repetition – the very act that many regard as the definitive feature of trauma and the traumatic experience (Caruth 1995, 4). This is genuinely exciting because although repetition sits at the heart of the experience of trauma, it remains perhaps the most under-theorized aspect within contemporary trauma studies. Although I would not want to suggest that Couto carries out a grand theorization of repetition in his novel, I do want to propose that he at least complicates the idea of repetition as something that can be understood simply as a return of the same.

As this collection as a whole indicates, the critical response to Mia Couto's writing is already extensive. And as his works become increasingly popular to a global audience through an increasing number of translations of his work, it is clear that this range of responses will only continue to expand. For this reason, the non-Portuguese-speaking reader who is new to Couto's writing may feel a little disoriented by the wide number of critical texts available on his work, as well as the vast range of more general sources that play an important role in contextualizing the issues that commonly concern Couto. In light of this, this bibliographic essay aims to highlight the most significant works available in English with which an Anglophone reader who is new to Couto can profitably engage. It is a range of writing that concerns the various contexts in which Couto's fiction sits, and the broad issues that the reader will always come face-to-face with in his writing: translation, narrative mode, questions of identity, politics of place, and the environment. Of course, this selection of texts is not exhaustive, but as an indication of possible points of departure for continued private research and private thinking on the significance of Couto's literary oeuvre, it is felt that it is nonetheless valuable. Undoubtedly, as his reputation grows in the Anglophone world and beyond, numerous new studies will complement not only this selection of texts, but also this collection of new research that you hold in your hands.

Authorial contexts

For the reader of Mia Couto, there is no shortage of useful biographical material already available in English, even if until now much of that material has remained fairly informal in tone. Indeed, perhaps the best resources for the non-Portuguese-speaking reader are the numerous interviews that Couto has given over the years. Of these, Gendy's interview (2015), which was conducted at the time that Couto won the Neustadt Prize in 2015, is a useful point of departure. In this interview Gendy teases out a general picture of Couto's literary, intellectual, and political investments. Esposito's interview (2013) is also worthy of special mention.

Dambudzo Marechera's The House of Hunger is a text that has drawn widely divergent critical responses. As Drew Shaw makes clear in his essay ‘Transgressing Traditional Narrative Form,’ those critics who supported the official literary aesthetic of social realism in the newly independent Zimbabwe found much to be concerned about in Marechera's writing. Mbulelo Mzamane, Musaemura Zimunya and Juliet Okonkwo gave something less than a glowing recommendation of Marechera's experimental writing and in his book, Those Years of Drought: The Birth of Black Zimbabwean Literature in English, Zimunya derides the fractured nature of Marechera's writing, reducing it to nothing more than an ‘eclectic babble’ which cannot ‘enrich one's own culture.’ Evidencing this, Zimunya singles out the ending of ‘House of Hunger’ because he can see ‘no technical link between the last fragment of the novella … and the rest of the story.’ In a similar spirit, Okonkwo writes in her review of The House of Hunger that Marechera's writing is ‘deliberately … sordid and shocking.’ She goes on to write, his ‘excessive interest in sex activity, his tireless attempt to rake up filth, his insistent expression of a debased philosophy built around “stains on a sheet”’ is ‘alien to Africa – a continent of hope and realizable dreams.’ Importantly, these critics dismiss the value of Marechera's writing because it seems to consciously position itself outside of Emmanuel Ngara and Fay Chung's influential vision of Zimbabwean literature as something that can ‘play a truly positive and constructive role in the building of socialism in Zimbabwe.’