Jose Saramago Biography Quotes 38 Report mistakes

Early Life
Jose de Sousa Saramago was born on 16 November 1922 in the rural village of Azinhaga, in Portugal's Ribatejo region, to Jose de Sousa and Maria da Piedade, landless agricultural laborers. The surname by which he became known, Saramago, entered his official papers through a registry clerk's mistake, adopting a family nickname that referred to a wild plant. The family moved to Lisbon when he was a small child, seeking work and stability, and the experience of poverty, migration, and social hierarchy left lasting marks on his imagination. He attended technical school rather than university and educated himself largely in public libraries, reading widely across Portuguese and European literature while holding modest jobs to support himself.

Early Work and Political Commitment
Saramago's first published novel, Terra do Pecado (Land of Sin), appeared in 1947, the same year he married Ilda Reis, a typist who later became a noted engraver. Their daughter, Violante, was born in 1947. For decades he balanced writing with work as a car mechanic, a civil servant, a translator, and a journalist. He joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969, a commitment that shaped both his public life and his literary sensibility during the final years of the Estado Novo dictatorship. He wrote poetry and newspaper columns and held editorial responsibilities, including work at Diario de Lisboa. Though he continued to write, he did not publish another novel for many years, choosing instead to refine his voice in poetry, chronicles, and criticism.

Turning to Literature Full-Time
The Carnation Revolution of April 1974 opened Portugal's political and cultural life, and for a brief period Saramago served in senior roles at the newspaper Diario de Noticias. In the political turmoil that followed, he lost his position in 1975. That break became decisive: he resolved to live by writing. He wrote plays, reportage, and the travel book Viagem a Portugal (Journey to Portugal), but his breakthrough as a novelist came with Levantado do Chao (Raised from the Ground, 1980), a generational saga of rural workers whose narrative rhythms and long, undulating sentences announced a distinctive style.

Major Works and Narrative Style
In the 1980s and early 1990s Saramago produced a sequence of novels that established his international stature. Memorial do Convento (Baltasar and Blimunda, 1982) reimagined the building of the Mafra convent through a blend of love story, popular memory, and baroque invention. O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, 1984) conversed with the heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa, placing the poet's creation in a Lisbon haunted by history. A Jangada de Pedra (The Stone Raft, 1986) envisioned the Iberian Peninsula drifting into the Atlantic, a parable of identity and belonging. Historia do Cerco de Lisboa (The History of the Siege of Lisbon, 1989) explored how a single editorial choice can bend the past.

His language became instantly recognizable: scant quotation marks, elastic sentences linked by commas, free indirect discourse, and a narrator who glides between irony and compassion. These choices turned his novels into contemporary fables that probed politics, memory, and the ethics of community.

Controversy and Lanzarote
O Evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo (The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, 1991) sparked intense controversy in Portugal. The government blocked its candidacy for a European literary prize, citing offense to religious sensibilities. Feeling censored, Saramago and the Spanish journalist and translator Pilar del Rio, whom he married in 1988 and who became his closest collaborator, moved in 1993 to Tias, on the island of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. There he kept diaries later published as the Cuadernos de Lanzarote and continued a prolific period of writing. His Portuguese editor Zeferino Coelho at Editorial Caminho supported this phase, while Giovanni Pontiero's English translations, and later those of Margaret Jull Costa, brought his voice to a global readership.

Nobel Prize and International Recognition
Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (Blindness, 1995) cemented his reputation with its stark allegory of a society struck by a plague of blindness. It was adapted for cinema in 2008 by director Fernando Meirelles, helping extend Saramago's reach. He received the Camoes Prize in 1995, the preeminent award for Portuguese-language literature, and in 1998 won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer in Portuguese to receive it. The Swedish Academy praised the imaginative parable form through which he examined fragile realities and moral choice. Subsequent novels, including Todos os Nomes (All the Names, 1997), Ensaio sobre a Lucidez (Seeing, 2004), As Intermitencias da Morte (Death with Interruptions, 2005), A Viagem do Elefante (The Elephant's Journey, 2008), and Cain (2009), extended his exploration of authority, freedom, mortality, and faith, often redefining the boundaries between epic and everyday life.

Public Voice and Cultural Engagement
Saramago remained an engaged public intellectual. He spoke candidly on politics, social inequality, and religion, positions often debated at home and abroad. With Pilar del Rio, he helped establish the Fundacao Jose Saramago to promote literature, human rights, and cultural dialogue. He experimented with new media late in life, keeping an online notebook whose entries revealed his daily discipline and curiosity. Friends, translators, and publishers formed a circle that sustained his work across languages; the deaths and retirements of collaborators such as Giovanni Pontiero were followed by new partnerships, notably with Margaret Jull Costa, ensuring continuity for readers worldwide.

Personal Life
Saramago's first marriage to Ilda Reis ended in the 1970s; their daughter, Violante, worked to preserve her father's memory alongside Pilar del Rio, who also translated many of his books into Spanish and chaired the foundation bearing his name. His personal routines were spare and consistent: early mornings, long hours at the desk, and evening walks, habits that mirrored the patience and persistence evident in his prose.

Final Years and Legacy
Jose Saramago died on 18 June 2010 in Tias, Lanzarote, at the age of 87. His ashes were later placed under an olive tree in Lisbon, near the headquarters of his foundation, symbolically linking his adopted home in the Atlantic to the city where he had long labored. After his death, Claraboia (Skylight), a novel written in the 1950s, was published, offering a window onto the young writer who would transform the novel in Portuguese. His influence endures in the work of contemporary authors who adopt hybrid forms, ethical allegory, and narrators that are at once skeptical and humane. Anchored by figures who accompanied him, Ilda Reis and Violante in his early struggles, Pilar del Rio and Zeferino Coelho in his mature years, translators Giovanni Pontiero and Margaret Jull Costa bringing his cadence into new tongues, Saramago's life and writing trace a singular arc from rural Portugal to the center of world literature, sustained by an unwavering faith in language as a tool for asking difficult, necessary questions.

Our collection contains 38 quotes who is written by Jose, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Truth - Justice - Writing - Learning.