José Saramago

Who is José Saramago?

José Saramago was a Portuguese novelist, playwright, and journalist who became the first Portuguese-language author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 1998. Born in 1922 in Azinhaga, a small village in central Portugal, he came from a family of landless peasants and worked various jobs, including as a mechanic, before establishing himself as a writer. His distinctive literary style features long, flowing sentences, sparse punctuation, and a blend of allegory, irony, and fantasy grounded in political and social concern. His major works include 'Memorial do Convento' (Baltasar and Blimunda, 1982), 'O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis' (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, 1984), and 'Ensaio sobre a Cegueira' (Blindness, 1995), which imagines a society struck by an epidemic of white blindness. A committed communist and outspoken sceptic of religion and power, Saramago spent his later years living in Lanzarote, Spain. He died in 2010.

Sources: José Saramago, 'Ensaio sobre a Cegueira' (Blindness, 1995) · The Nobel Prize in Literature 1998 — nobelprize.org official records