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Jose Saramago _____________________
Portugal (1922- )
José Saramago was born in 1922 to a family of farmers in the little village of Azinhaga (Ribatejo) north of Lisbon. For financial reasons he abandoned his high-school studies and trained as a mechanic.
After trying different jobs in the civil service, he worked for a publishing company for twelve years and then for newspapers, at one time as assistant editor of Diário de Notícias, a position he was forced to leave after the political events in November 1975. In 1969 he joined the then illegal Communist Party, in which however he has always adopted a critical standpoint.
Between 1975 and 1980 Saramago supported himself as a translator but since his literary successes in the 1980s he has devoted himself to his own writing. His international breakthrough came in 1982 with the blasphemous and humorous love story Baltasar and Blimunda, a novel set in 18th century Portugal. Since 1992 he has been living on Lanzarote, the northeasternmost of the Canaries. Saramago's oeuvre totals 30 works, and comprises not only prose but also poetry, essays and drama. (Petri Liukkonen, Books and Writers)
Jose Saramago is a master of the parable, drawing on Portugal’s history and heritage, to tell stories of cruelty love and humanity. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, just after the novel Blindness was published. This work is part of a trilogy that marks a shift in his writing, from historical fantasies to allegorical explorations.
He’s an atheist, communist, and public intellectual who delivers strong views of what he calls our barbaric, beautiful world, both from the podium and in the quiet prose of the page. (www.theconnection.org)
MAJOR NOVELS:
The Cave (2002)
Saramago, Jose. "How Characters Became the Masters and the Author Their Apprentice." Nobel Lecture.
December 7, 1998. This is Saramago's acceptance speech upon winning the Nobel Prize. He discusses his views of literature and life.
Klobucka, Anna. "A Writer's Progress: An Interview with Nobel Prize-Winning Portuguese Novelist José Saramago." Mass Humanities. Spring 2002. Brief but insightful discussion.
Vaz, Katherine. "José Saramago." Bomb Magazine. Longer interview that provides a good overview of his works. |
