José Saramago

Born on 16 November 1922 in Azinhaga, a small village in the Ribatejo province of Portugal, José de Sousa Saramago was the son of landless peasants. His family moved to Lisbon in 1924, and his father found work as a policeman. Financial hardship forced the young Saramago out of secondary school and into a locksmith’s apprenticeship , he would later say that the public library was the true university of his life, the place where he educated himself book by book over decades. He worked as a mechanic, civil servant, editor, translator, and journalist before publishing his first novel, Terra do Pecado (Land of Sin), in 1947 at the age of twenty-five. Then he fell silent for nearly two decades. His literary career truly began in his fifties, an almost unprecedented late start, with Baltasar and Blimunda (1982), a love story set against the construction of a fantastical flying machine during the Portuguese Inquisition. Saramago developed a radically distinctive prose style , minimal punctuation, dialogue embedded in continuous paragraphs without quotation marks, sentences that unfurl across pages like spoken thought. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984) imagined a Fernando Pessoa heteronym wandering Lisbon. The Stone Raft (1986) set the Iberian Peninsula literally adrift from Europe. Blindness (1995), an allegory in which an epidemic of white blindness dismantles civilization, became his most internationally celebrated work. In 1992, the Portuguese government removed The Gospel According to Jesus Christ from the European Literary Prize shortlist, calling it religiously offensive; Saramago, disgusted by what he regarded as censorship, left Portugal for the Spanish island of Lanzarote. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. He died on 18 June 2010 in Lanzarote, at the age of eighty-seven.

The wisest man he ever knew could not read or write. His grandfather Jerónimo was a swineherd in Azinhaga, and on the coldest winter nights the two of them would carry the weakest piglets in from the sty and take them into their own bed, human warmth saving the animals from freezing.