In 1999, Mozambican writer Mia Couto was awarded the Prémio Vergílio Ferreira. This was a great honor for someone only forty-three years old, and whose oeuvre consists largely of short stories. By then, however, Couto was not only an established writer in his own country but he was well known throughout the Portuguese-speaking world, where his books sell in large numbers. Although a great deal by now has been written about him, the key to his exceptional success remains largely unexplained. Why should Mia Couto appeal so widely, especially to those readers who know little or nothing about Mozambique? What can such readership find in a prose so replete with ‘Mozambicanisms’ and so heavily accented by an invented language?

Couto started his literary journey as a poet and he has written novels as well as a number of plays, but I want here to focus on his short stories, or contos, for they represent in my view the essence of his work. It is in the short stories that Couto achieves the greatest degree of literary originality, exhibits the most notable poetry, creates the most imaginative language, and reveals the most acute psychological insights. It is also in the contos that he develops a body of writing chronicling the evolution of the country in which he lives. Finally, it is plain, as I shall explain later, that his novels are, in large measure at least, constructed according to a ‘short story’ blueprint.

The writing of short stories has always been a most difficult art, which very few contemporary writers attempt. Among the present canon of twentieth-century writers, only a small number are the crafters of short stories. Interestingly, it has been, in the recent past, a genre more widely essayed in non-European settings – whether in North or South America – than it is in the continent in which such writing flourished in the nineteenth century. Perhaps it is today a form of literary expression particularly well suited to the new world, frontier spaces, the far reaches of empire, or even more, to the postcolonial experience. Perhaps it is a type of writing that remains closer to the orality of everyday life, and such orality is often the mark of ‘new’ or ‘marginal’ areas.

Whatever the reasons for Mia Couto's inclination to compose short stories, it is important to discuss the personal and historical context within which he has been writing.