José Saramago

José de Sousa Saramago (1922-2010) was born in the small village of Azinhaga, Portugal, to poor landless peasant parents, a few hundred kilometers northeast of Lisbon. The name "Saramago" was a family nickname from the de Sousa family, derived from a type of wild radish eaten by the poor, and was recorded on his birth certificate. He spent his school years in Lisbon, where, despite his aptitude for letters, he was forced to leave high school for a technical school that helped him find work as a car mechanic. Meanwhile, he visited the National Library in the evenings, reading "without assistance or guidance, driven only by curiosity and the desire to learn," as he writes in his autobiography. Entirely self-taught, Saramago published the novel "Land of Sin" in 1947, which went unnoticed during Salazar's dictatorship. A communist with illegal political activities, he worked for many years in publishing houses and newspapers as a commentator, literary page editor, and book critic. After the 1974 revolution, he briefly served as deputy director of the major Lisbon newspaper "Diarios de Noticias." He became one of the most renowned authors in his country, mainly due to his novels. In 1998, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the last years of his life, he lived in the Canary Islands, where he moved in 1993 following a peak in his conflict with the Portuguese Church over his work "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ." His most famous books include: "Manual of Painting and Calligraphy" (1977), "Raised from the Ground" (1980), "Journey to Portugal" (1981), "Baltasar and Blimunda" (1983), "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis" (1984), "The Stone Raft" (1986), "The History of the Siege of Lisbon" (1989), "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" (1991), "Blindness" (1995), "All the Names" (1997), "The Cave" (2001), "The Double" (2003), "Seeing" (2004). He passed away at the age of 87 on the island of Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands, on June 18, 2010.