Death of José Saramago

José Saramago died on 18 June 2010 in Lanzarote, aged 87. A Portuguese novelist, born into a poor rural family, Saramago worked as a mechanic, a civil servant and a journalist before devoting himself fully to writing in his late fifties. His breakthrough was Baltasar and Blimunda in 1982, and his best-known works include The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Blindness. His novels often combine fantasy with history and social criticism, written in long sentences with unusual punctuation. A communist and atheist, he angered the Portuguese government with his Gospel, after which he moved to the Spanish island of Lanzarote. In 1998 he became the first writer in Portuguese to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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