José Saramago

José Saramago was born into a family of landless peasants in Azinhaga, a village in the Ribatejo; his surname, a local word for wild radish, was a nickname entered by mistake on his birth record. His family moved to Lisbon when he was a small child. Unable to afford grammar school, his parents sent him to a technical school, and he worked as a mechanic, a civil servant, a translator and a journalist. He joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969 and remained a member for the rest of his life. A first novel appeared in 1947, but he would publish little fiction for decades afterward.

His real career began in his late fifties. Baltasar and Blimunda (1982), set around the building of the Mafra convent, and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984), in which a heteronym of Fernando Pessoa outlives his author, established his manner: long paragraphs, dialogue folded into the narrative, and a wry, digressive narrator. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ provoked the Portuguese government to remove it from a European prize shortlist, after which Saramago moved to Lanzarote with his wife, Pilar del Río. Blindness (1995) imagined a society undone by a sudden epidemic of white blindness.

He was the first writer in Portuguese to receive the Nobel Prize. In his final decade he published The Double, Seeing and Death with Interruptions, and his foundation in Lisbon continues his work. He died on Lanzarote in 2010.