Nobel Prize Winning Author José Saramago: 1922-2010

Portuguese writer José Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, passed away today at his home in Lanzarote, Canary Islands, Spain. He was of 87.

Saramago was the first Portuguese writer to be named a Nobel Laureate for literature, which he was awarded for his novel Baltasar and Blimunda, the surrealist tale of a soldier and a seer employed by a mad cleric to build a flying machine.

Saramago is best known for Blindness, his gripping tale of an epidemic of sightlessness, which was adapted into a 2008 feature film directed by Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles.

Other acclaimed (and highly provocative) works by José Saramago include The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, a psychological study of Jesus which was pulled from the selection for the 1992 European Literature Prize, and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, his only work that tackles the brutal and oft-undiscussed dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar and his rise to power in the 1930s.

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