A journey across boundaries

In The Living and the Rest, for example, writers and poets from different African countries come to the Island of Mozambique for a literary week. As the story develops, writers meet characters from their books in the fictional reality.

Some critics categorize Agualusa's style as magic realism, although the author strongly disagrees.

Magical realism is a storytelling approach often used in Latin American literature, where fantastical or mythical elements are matter-of-factly woven into otherwise realistic narratives. It is seen as an effective strategy allowing writers to examine problems in post-colonial societies.

"When I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the master of magical realism, I feel something very familiar and real in his work," he says.

Agualusa found evidence in Marquez's visit to Angola to support this feeling. In 1977, two years after Angola's independence from Portugal, the Colombian writer was invited to visit the country to write about its community of Cubans. In Angola, Marquez found a universe similar to his childhood in Latin America.

"That's why I say there is something very similar between South American and African cultures," he says.

Agualusa says he does not like to be labeled.

"What they call magic realism is actually everyday life in Africa, so I prefer to define it as African realism," he says, adding that "some African writers call it animism instead".

"In The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka turned a person into a gigantic insect. In The Living and the Rest, I wrote about a woman transforming from a cockroach. People call me a magical realist, but nobody labels Kafka that way," he says.

"This kind of label sometimes restricts our recognition of literature, and it is what a writer needs to break," he says.

Agualusa closed his speech by saying that writing transcends the boundaries of possibility. "The impossible paths, the paths that frighten us, are the only paths worth exploring for writers. Writing — like all journeys — is about seeking wonder. I believe that the only limit for writers is their imagination."