Drawing from João Paulo Borges Coelho’s non-fictional reflections on the process of literary composition, this chapter argues that a defining feature of the author’s work has to do with a defence of the idea of artistic autonomy against more commercial and exoticising modes of postcolonial writing. This plea for autonomy, which emerges in a most visible way in his 2007 novel Campo de Trânsito, becomes in Borges Coelho’s hands a ploy to market his fiction as a self-conscious, ‘high-brow’ alternative to other Portuguese-speaking African writers. Whereas works by Paulina Chiziane, Mia Couto, and José Eduardo Agualusa are more easily co-opted by the exoticising logic of postcolonial publishing, Borges Coelho’s cultivation of a sometimes densely experimental narrative style, as well as his intertextual references to European authors such as Franz Kafka, WG Sebald, and Thomas Bernhard, render his texts less amenable to attempts at reducing their frame of reference solely to the national history of Mozambique. Insofar as it includes within itself a canny critique and playful anticipation of its own reception by critics, Campo de Trânsito emblematises Borges Coelho’s appeal to a niche academic audience, one distinguished from the ‘low-brow’ figure of the market reader. With reference to Graham Huggan’s widely cited notion of the ‘postcolonial exotic’, as well as to Sarah Brouillette’s nuanced critique of it, I situate Borges Coelho in relation to these mass-market modes of postcolonial reading by evaluating his vexed attempts to move beyond them.