On November 16, 1922 was born in the village of Aziniaga in Portugal, Jose de Souza Saramagoa writer who in the second half of his life would be heavily involved in the literary and political scene of Portugal and would become the holder of the Nobel Prize for Literature at the age of 66.

He took quite a while to deal with literature. But he always showed his dissatisfaction with capitalism and especially with the political line of his country. He worked as a car mechanic, but spent his evenings at National Library of Lisbon, where he lived. His curiosity and willingness to learn, as he had stated, were what taught him the most in life.

In the following years, journalism won him over. He declared himself an atheist and a communist, with illegal political activity and strongly questioned the values ​​of post-dictatorship life in Portugal, with his works such as Baltasar & Blimunda, The Year Ricardo Reis Died and All the Names, but he became more widely known for his novel On Blindness, the 1995.

The Portuguese writer who created unreal stories

The author, who had been criticized many times for his religious as well as political views, was highly critical of the political identity of Portugal in the 20th century. His works combined harsh reality and his criticism of the events of his time, but masked with the myth and allegory he loved so much, all set in a world full of illusions and of course, dreams.

Of course, irony could not be missing from his work. This bold pen of his forced him to self-exile in 1992 in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, as it had been preceded by a severe criticism of his blasphemous, according to the Catholic Church, book The Gospel According to Jesus. Portugal’s then-conservative government would reject his nomination for the European Prize for Literature, and Saramago would once again be disappointed by his homeland.

In 1998, José Saramago will win the Nobel Prize for Literature, with the organizers emphasizing that “The stories in his books may seem strange and unreal, but they help us understand that part of reality that escapes us.”

From his home in Lanzarote he will seldom move. There he will learn that he suffers from leukemia, because of which he will be hospitalized several times in the last years of his life. His illness will finally defeat him on June 18, 2010, and the controversial Nobel Prize-winning writer will take his last breath.

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