An amazing journey, through images, narratives, and excerpts from books, into the life of José Saramago. José Saramago is undoubtedly one of the great masters of literature. The only author in the Portuguese language to have been awarded a Nobel Prize, he has left treasures such as the novels Blindness, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, and The Year of Ricardo Reis' Death.

In 2022, we celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the man who started as a mechanic, became a civil servant, a publisher, and finally a writer, elevating the art of writing to new levels. This original biographical album, divided into four sections – places/locations, readings/meanings, writings/creations, and ties/people – captures the life of José Saramago intertwined with more than two hundred names, among them cities, historical landmarks, friends, characters from books, Lanzarote, Brazil, Blimunda, God, Judas, Fernando Pessoa, Marx, Jorge Amado, and Pilar.

All of this is framed with images from the Saramago Archive and references from publications. Through impeccable research, Alejandro García Snetcher and Ricardo Viel present to the world a new José: his sources of inspiration, his students, the landscapes that shaped his journey, and the amalgam of his relationship with the human being. Everything that, therefore, led José to become Saramago.

“It is important to constantly return to the moral consciousness that is present in the work of José Saramago. This consciousness maintains its sharpness today, both condemning exclusion and inequalities and delivering its important message on the need to ‘reclaim the duty’ to defend and uphold the rights given to each individual and to all of us. This photo-biography will contribute, I believe, to more readers remembering or discovering the exhortation ‘ordinary citizens should take the floor and the initiative’ – and never to relinquish this right.”

António Guterres, UN Secretary-General