José Saramago

José Saramago was a Portuguese writer born in 1922 in Azinhaga, Portugal, into a family of poor landless peasants, who achieved international acclaim with novels like Baltasar and Blimunda and Blindness, and won the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature for his parables sustained by imagination, compassion, and irony. Known for his experimental style and political views as a communist and atheist critic of institutions, he went into exile in Lanzarote, Spain, after controversy over The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, and died there in 2010.