Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, José Saramago on 28 February was honoured with the title of ‘Favoured Son of Andalusia’. In an emotional ceremony, Saramago was given the task of representing all those awarded medals by the regional authorities. The Portuguese writer, who has for more than 20 years of been married to a journalist from Seville, revealed the profound and sincere affection in which he holds Andalusia, a place which for him is now “my homeland”.


José de Sousa Saramago was born on 16 November 1922 in the village of Azinhaga, in the central province of Ribatejo, Portugal, close to the River Tagus. His parents were José de Sousa and María de Piedade, a landless peasant couple, and this background was to have a profound impact on the character and ideology of the writer. The nickname of his father’s family was Saramago (the name of a wild plant), and a ‘lapsus calami’, or slip of the pen, on the part of the clerk at the civil register christened him José ‘Saramago’. In 1924, the family moved to Lisbon, and a few months later his elder brother Francisco passed away. In 1934, at the age of 12, Saramago was enrolled at an industrial school, where among the free textbooks he discovered the classics. Although a diligent student, he was unable to complete his studies as he was forced to begin work at a mechanical workshop. Meanwhile, with no instruction whatsoever, he read his way through the whole of the district public library.
He soon changed jobs, becoming an administrative clerk at the Social Security office. It was after his marriage in 1944 to Ilda Reis that Saramago wrote his first novel: ‘Terra de Pecado’, published to no great success in 1947. The same year saw the birth of his first daughter, Violante. Saramago wrote a second novel, ‘Skylight’, but it was never published, and was to be 20 years before he returned to literature. He joined the workforce of an insurance company, and at the same time wrote for the Diário de Notícias newspaper, but was sacked for political reasons. He later worked as a literary critic for the magazine Seara Nova, and as a cultural commentator, in turn suffering censorship and persecution under the Salazar dictatorship. He found work at a publishing house, where he remained for twelve years, in his free time translating the works of Maupassant, Tolstoy, Baudelaire, Colette… In 1966 he published ‘Os Poemas Possíveis’. By 1969 he was a member of the Portuguese Communist Party, while in the same year he divorced Ilda and left his publishing job to dedicate to writing. In 1974 he added his voice to the Carnation Revolution which brought democracy to Portugal.
His first great novel was ‘Levantado do Chão’ (1980), a fresh portrait of the living conditions of workers in Lavre, in the province of Alentejo. It was in this work that Saramago succeeded in finding his own voice, the clear, unmistakable and almost poetic style. Over the following years, Saramago was to publish further works almost non-stop. In 1986 he met his current wife, the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río, a native of Seville. 1998 saw him awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first author writing in Portuguese to receive the honour. He currently divides his time between Lisbon and the Spanish island of Lanzarote. In his most recent novel, ‘As Pequenas Memórias’, he returns to the landscapes of his childhood.
José Saramajo, Favoured Son of Andalusia, is one of the most striking novelists on the contemporary literary scene.