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José Saramago, 70s ©FJS Archive/Reserved Rights

Autobiography

I was born in a family of landless peasants, in Azinhaga, a small village located in the province of Ribatejo, on the right bank of the river Almonda, some hundred kilometers northeast of Lisbon. My parents were called José de Sousa and Maria da Piedade. José de Sousa would also have been my name if the civil registry official, on his own initiative, had not added the nickname for which my father's family was known in the village: Saramago. (It should be clarified that saramago is a spontaneous herbaceous plant, whose leaves, in those times, in times of need, served as food in the kitchen of the poor). Only when I was seven, when I had to present an identification document at primary school, did it become known that my full name was José de Sousa Saramago… However, this was not the only identity problem I was faced with in the baby crib. Although I came into the world on November 16, 1922, my official documents state that I was born two days later, at 18: it was thanks to this small fraud that the family es

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Biography

José de Sousa Saramago is a Portuguese writer, journalist and playwright. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. He currently lives in the Canary islands.

José Saramago was born in Azinhaga, a small village north-east of Lisbon in 1922. In 1924, José's family moved to Lisbon, where, although he was a good student, José had to leave school for financial reasons. Eventually he began working as a translator and a journalist for the paper Diário de Noticias. He eventually married Ilda Reis, with whom he had a daughter in 1947. In 1988, José Saramago remarried to Pilar del Rio, a journalist who is also the official translator of his books into Spanish.

Saramago didn't achieve literary acclaim until his mid-fifties with the publication of the novel Baltasar and Blimunda. Saramago has been a source of controversy since he joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969–he is also openly an atheist. His stances on the state of Israel and his novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ have angered both the Jewish and Catholic community respectively.

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Biography José Saramago

José Saramago was born on 16th November 1922 in Azinhaga, a village in the province of Ribatejo that was as humble as his own family. Although he grew up in a house without books, he soon fell in love with them. He first came into contact with literature at school, but later, when he had to leave to start work as a toolmaker, the thrall in which books held him ensured he was a regular visitor to his local library.

Intellectually curious, the young Saramago became an autodidact and a man committed to the causes of his time. An opponent of Salazar and his dictatorship, he joined the Communist Party in 1969. He was also a staunch critic of the Catholic Church, the target of choice of some of the books he would later write, such as “Baltasar and Blimunda” (1982), “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” (1991) and “Cain” (2009).

Until devoting himself fully to his literary career, which he did from 1976 onwards, he had various professions. He was a draughtsman, health and social worker, translator, editor and journalist.