Jose Saramago

José Saramago was a Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. He was born in a poor rural family in Azinhaga, Portugal, and moved to Lisbon with his parents when he was two years old. He studied at a technical school and worked as a mechanic, a civil servant, a translator, and a journalist. He joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969 and was an outspoken critic of the dictatorship of António Salazar and the subsequent governments. He published his first novel, Terra do Pecado, in 1947, but did not achieve literary recognition until 1980, when he published the historical novel Baltasar and Blimunda. His subsequent works include The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984), The Stone Raft (1986), The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), Blindness (1995), All the Names (1997), and The Cave (2000). His novels are characterized by a blend of realism, fantasy, allegory, and satire, often addressing themes such as history, politics, religion, and human nature. He also wrote essays, poems, memoirs, and travelogues. He received numerous awards and honors, such as the Camões Prize, the Jerusalem Prize, and the Prince of Asturias Award. He died in 2010 in Lanzarote, Spain, where he had lived since 1993 with his second wife, the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río. He was buried in Lisbon, under an olive tree, in front of the José Saramago Foundation, which he created in 2007 to promote culture, literature, and human rights.