José Saramago

David Frier (University of Leeds)

Ed. by Stuart Green, University of Leeds
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.6.3.00: Portuguese Writing and Culture, 700-present.
Vol. editors: Stuart Green (University of Leeds), Duncan Wheeler (University of Leeds)

Dates

Born 16 Nov 1922
Died 18 Jun 2010
Activity 1947-2010

Places

Born in Portugal
Active in Portugal

Activities

Primary

Novelist
Playwright / Dramatist

Resources

Saramago's Works

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The only Portuguese-speaking author to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1998), José Saramago is also one of the few contemporary writers in Portuguese to have made a significant impact in the English-speaking world. His status in Portugal (and in Spain, his adopted country of residence) is an extremely high-profile one, due not only to his literary prominence but also to his very public engagement with social and political issues (he is a well-known and long-standing member of the Portuguese Communist Party, and he has also recently set up a charitable foundation bearing his name to draw attention to ecological issues and to draw attention to new writing in Portuguese). After some thirty years of low-key literary activity (consisting of one unremarkable early novel,

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3097 words

Citation: Frier, David. "José Saramago". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 December 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=11974, accessed 24 November 2024.]