José Saramago

José Saramago was born to a poor family and raised primarily in Lisbon, where his father was a low-ranking police officer in the administration of dictator António Salazar. Saramago also frequently visited his grandparents in the rural village where he was born—he cited his grandfather, an illiterate pig farmer, as the greatest influence on his writing. Although Saramago excelled in school, as a teenager he was forced to switch to a technical education; he became a car mechanic, although he read avidly in his free time. He married the engraver Ilda Reis, and they had one daughter in 1947—the same year that Saramago published his first novel, The Land of Sin. Though Saramago wrote sporadically over the next decade, he did not publish anything else until nearly 20 years later. Instead, he continued to move through different various trades as well as careers in the publishing industry. In 1974, socialist revolutionaries successfully toppled Portugal’s authoritarian regime, and Saramago, a communist, was made director of a prominent national newspaper. However, the next year, backlash to this revolution led to Saramago’s firing. Although Saramago was devastated, the experience persuaded him to focus on novel-writing. In the 1980s, he won widespread acclaim for a string of prominent books: Baltazar and Blimunda, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, The Stone Raft, and The History of the Siege of Lisbon. In 1991, Saramago’s novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ raised significant controversy: the Catholic Church officially denounced Saramago, and the Portuguese government formally withdrew his name from consideration for the European Literary Prize. In protest, Saramago left Portugal and moved to the Canary Islands, where he went on to live the rest of his life with his second wife, Pilar del Río. In the last two decades of his life, Saramago published more than a dozen more novels. In 1995, in addition to publishing Blindness, Saramago won the Camões Prize, the most important prize for Portuguese-language literature. In 1998, Saramago also became the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Saramago died in 2010 of leukemia.