Baltasar & Blimunda

Nobel Prize in Literature, 1998

Author of more than 40 titles, José Saramago was born in 1922, in the village of Azinhaga.
The nights spent in the public library of the Galveias Palace, in Lisbon, were fundamental for his training. «And it was there, without help or advice, only guided by curiosity and the desire to learn, that my taste for reading developed and refined.»
In 1947 he published his first book entitled The Widow, but which, for editorial reasons, would come out with the title Land of Sin. Six years later, in 1953, he would finish the novel Skylight, published only after his death.
At the end of the 50s he became responsible for production at Editorial Estúdios Cor, a role that he would combine with that of translator, from 1955, and literary critic.
He returned to writing in 1966 with Os Poemas Possívels.
In 1971 he took on the role of editorialist at the Diário de Lisboa and in April 1975 he was appointed deputy director of the Diário de Notícias.
At the beginning of 1976 he settled in Lavre to document his project of writing about the landless peasants. Thus was born the novel Levantado do Chão and the way of narrating that characterizes his novelistic fiction. Until 2010, the year of his death, on June 18, in Lanzarote, José Saramago built an unavoidable work in Portuguese and universal literature, with titles ranging from Memorial do Convento to Cain, passing through The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Blindness, All the Names or The Elephant's Journey, works translated all over the world.
In 2007, a Foundation with his name was created in Lisbon, which works for the dissemination of literature, for the defense of human rights and the environment, taking the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a guiding document. Since 2012, the José Saramago Foundation has had its headquarters at Casa dos Bicos, in Lisbon.
José Saramago received the Camões Prize in 1995 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.
The President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, posthumously decorated, on November 16, 2021, José Saramago with the Grand Collar of the Order of Camões, for the "unique services rendered to Portuguese culture and language", at the start of the celebrations of the centenary of the writer's birth.