The Modern Novel

Biography

José Saramago was born in 1922 in Azinhaga, about 100 kilometres north-east of Lisbon. His father was called José de Sousa but the registrar recorded the child under the family nickname of Saramago (it means wild radish). When he was two, the family moved to Lisbon, where his father worked as a police officer, but Saramago still spent a lot of time with his grandparents in the countryside. As the family was not well-off, he went to technical school and then worked as a car mechanic. However, he started taking an interest in literature and read in the public library. He published his first novel in 1947, though it was a naturalist novel and now only of historical interest. It would be nineteen years before he published another book, his first collection of poetry. In the meantime he worked as a translator and then a journalist. As he was a communist, he was fired from his position as associate editor of the Diário de Nóticias in 1975, when the Portuguese government became more right-wing. As a result he had more time to spend on writing books and after publishing a couple of novels that had limited success, he published Memorial do convento (Baltasar and Blimunda) in 1982, which brought him international success. He has been controversial in Portugal for his political and religious views, being a communist and an atheist, and taking strong views on political events, such as being critical of the US embargo on Cuba and being highly critical of Israel. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. He died in 2010.

Other links

José Saramago
Jose Saramago
The Unexpected Fantasist
Obituary
Obituary
Obituary
Obituary
Obituary
Obituary
Interview
Interview
José Saramago (in Portuguese)
Interview (in Portuguese)