José Saramago

José Saramago was a Portuguese novelist, born on 16 November 1922 in Azinhaga, a village in Portugal, and died on 18 June 2010. He came from a poor rural family and worked for many years in jobs far from literature, including as a mechanic, a civil servant and a newspaper editor and translator, before devoting himself fully to writing in his fifties. His breakthrough came in the early 1980s with historical fiction, and he went on to write novels that place ordinary people in strange, invented situations to ask how societies and individuals behave under pressure. His style is easy to recognise: very long sentences, sparse punctuation and dialogue run into the narration. He was a committed public voice, often controversial in Portugal for his political and religious views. In 1998 he became the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. His books remain widely translated and read.