José de Sousa Saramago (1922–2010) was a Portuguese novelist, poet, screenwriter, journalist, and literary critic. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. He was born on November 16, 1922, in the small village of Azinhaga, about 100 kilometers northeast of Lisbon. In 1924, his family moved to Lisbon, where his father worked as a police officer. A few months later, his older brother died.
At the age of twelve, Saramago left school for financial reasons and trained as a locksmith. He later attended a technical school and worked for a time as a car mechanic. An avid reader from a young age, he educated himself through books and learned foreign languages on his own. Eventually, he found work in publishing and journalism, which allowed him to pursue his literary ambitions.
Saramago made his literary debut in 1947 with the novel *Land of Sin*, which attracted little attention. After a long silence, he returned with *Manual of Painting and Calligraphy* (1977). He achieved international recognition with *Baltasar and Blimunda* (1982), one of his most celebrated novels. During the following decades he produced many major works, including *The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis*, *The History of the Siege of Lisbon*, *The Stone Raft*, *The Gospel According to Jesus Christ*, and *Blindness*.
Saramago married in 1944 and had a daughter in 1947. He joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969 and supported the Carnation Revolution of 1974, which ended the dictatorship in Portugal. In 1988 he married the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río. During the last years of his life he lived in voluntary exile on the island of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. A declared atheist, he often clashed with the Catholic Church, particularly after the publication of *The Gospel According to Jesus Christ*. José Saramago died on June 18, 2010, at the age of eighty-seven.
