Mozambican writer Mia Couto has been named the 2025 recipient of the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, an honor recognizing a living author whose body of work represents the highest level of achievement in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or drama.

Presented by PEN America, the award celebrates writers whose work—either written in or translated into English—is both enduring and transformative, offering a lasting contribution to world literature.

“For decades, the work of Mozambican writer Mia Couto has occupied a singular place in the landscape of both African and world literature,” write the judges, praising his earliest books Voices Made Night, Sleepwalking Land, and A River Called Time as “searing reflections” written in the wake of Mozambique’s civil war. The judges citation continues:

We believe that Couto, who was awarded the 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, deserves even greater recognition on the global stage, and it is our hope that the 2025 PEN/Nabokov Award will help lift his voice across yet more borders. “We are building myths,” Couto has said of his fellow Mozambican writers who have grown with their country. “We are substitutes for the prophets.”

Couto’s more recent works continue to probe existential and political questions with poetic force. His Sands of the Emperor trilogy, which concludes with The Drinker of Horizons, centers on Imani, a vaChopi tribeswoman who proclaims, “I spin a web that joins the different races.” In these words, the judges see a reflection of Couto himself—“an alchemist of languages and worlds.”

Couto exemplified the spirit of the award in his acceptance speech which emphasized the role and power of writers in the face of repression:

I’m here because I’m part of a common struggle, the struggle to ensure that writers should be free and without fear to do their work. This battle is happening all the time everywhere. Nations are not big or small. America doesn’t need to become a great nation. America has always been a great nation, and it has been a great nation because artists were fighting against what could have made Americans small. They fought against the genocide of native people against slavery, against racism, and against use of violence inside and outside America. The voice of these artists has been an inspiration throughout the world, including my own country, Mozambique.

We offer a huge congratulations to Mia Couto for this well-deserved honor!