José Saramago wins the Nobel Prize in Literature: 8 October 1998

On Thursday 8 October 1998 José Saramago was in the departure lounge at Frankfurt airport, a few minutes from boarding a plane to Madrid. He was 75, a Portuguese novelist on his way home to Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands, after several days at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the biggest book fair in the world. A mobile phone rang. On the line was Zeferino Coelho, his publisher at Editorial Caminho in Lisbon.1 source

Coelho told him the Swedish Academy had just given him the Nobel Prize in Literature. Público's two reporters gave slightly different accounts the next morning: one said he was with José Oliveira, another of his Caminho editors, and that the two men embraced in tears; Saramago himself said it was his Madrid publishers who hugged him. Then he walked off alone, raincoat over his arm.1 source

He did not take the flight. At the fair, the news had reached stand 903, Caminho's, through a Brazilian journalist, and there was a rush to the airport. When Saramago came back, Portuguese publishers had stuck photocopied black-and-white photographs of him, captioned Nobel Prize for Literature 1998, on their stands. Staff in the Portuguese pavilion climbed onto chairs holding roses, and their Italian neighbours at the fair applauded.1 source

At a press conference that lasted a little over an hour, he said Portugal had waited almost a century for this, and that some Portuguese writers had probably deserved it more than he did. He asked everyone who spoke Portuguese to accept the prize as theirs. Then he added a joke: since the prize belonged to everyone, he would keep the money. It came to 7.6 million Swedish kronor, about 166 million escudos at the time.1 source

Saramago was born into a family of landless peasants in Azinhaga, a village on the right bank of the river Almonda in the Ribatejo, about 100 kilometres north-east of Lisbon. His parents were José de Sousa and Maria da Piedade. When the birth was registered, the registrar added, on his own initiative, the nickname the family went by in the village: Saramago, a wild plant whose leaves the poor ate in hard times.2 sources

In 1924 his father, who had served as an artillery soldier in France in the First World War, moved the family to Lisbon and joined the police. Saramago's older brother, Francisco, died a few months later. The boy spent long spells back in Azinhaga with his mother's parents, Jerónimo Meirinho and Josefa Caixinha, illiterate swineherds who would open his Nobel lecture.2 sources

He did well at school, but after two years of grammar school his parents could no longer afford it. He spent five years at a technical school learning to be a mechanical locksmith, a serralheiro mecânico, and worked for about two years in a car repair shop. The course included literature, and with no books at home, its Portuguese textbooks were his first way into it. In the evenings he read at a public library in Lisbon, the one at the Palácio Galveias, with nobody to guide him.3 sources

By 1944, when he married Ilda Reis, he was an administrative clerk in the social welfare service. In 1947, the year his only child, Violante, was born, he published a first novel. He had called it A Viúva (The Widow); the publisher changed it to Terra do Pecado (Land of Sin). Then he went quiet for 19 years.2 sources

He lost his job for political reasons in 1949 and found work at a metal company through a former teacher. In the late 1950s he became production manager at the publisher Estúdios Cor, and from 1955 he translated Colette, Tolstoy, Baudelaire and Hegel, among others, in his spare time. A book of poems in 1966 marked his return as an author. In 1969 he joined the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP).2 sources

After the 1974 revolution, in April 1975, he became deputy director of the Lisbon morning paper Diário de Notícias, during the months when the Communists were at their strongest. He was sacked that November, after the coup of 25 November 1975 ended the revolutionary period.2 sources

His months at the paper left lasting resentment. As Público told it in 1998, journalists who protested at the climate in the newsroom that summer, in what became known as the Manifesto of the 24, were pushed out, and 22 people left without compensation. Saramago answered in 1991 that the paper had a line and could not become a platform for everyone to say what they liked about it.1 source

Out of work, with no hope of another newspaper job, he decided to find out what he was worth as a writer. Early in 1976 he spent several weeks in Lavre, a village in the Alentejo, studying the lives of farm labourers. The result was Levantado do Chão (1980), three generations of a peasant family from the early twentieth century to the revolution of 1974. He wrote later that his way of telling stories was born in that book.3 sources

That way of telling became his signature: dialogue blended into the narration, sparse punctuation, and sentences that can run on for pages. The Guardian's obituary recorded his own verdict on how late it all came.2 sources

The Swedish Academy called Memorial do Convento (1982), published in English as Baltasar and Blimunda, his breakthrough. It is set in the eighteenth century, while thousands of labourers build King João V's convent, palace and basilica at Mafra, near Lisbon. Its lovers are Baltasar, a soldier who lost his left hand in the war, and Blimunda, who can see inside people's bodies. They help a priest build a flying machine powered by human will.3 sources

Mafra is real and enormous. João V built it to fulfil a vow for an heir, in local lioz limestone paid for with Brazilian gold: some 1,200 rooms, 4,700 doors and windows, and a library of about 38,000 volumes. Saramago's novel gives as much room to the thousands of men who hauled the stones as to the king.2 sources

Then came O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis (1984), his first bestseller, in which one of Fernando Pessoa's invented poets outlives Pessoa and wanders Lisbon in 1936. A Jangada de Pedra (1986) breaks the Iberian Peninsula off from Europe and floats it into the Atlantic. In História do Cerco de Lisboa (1989) a proofreader slips the word “not” into a history book and changes the past.3 sources

O Evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo came out in 1991. In it God and the Devil bargain over evil, and Jesus questions the part he has been given and challenges God. It drew hostile reactions from Catholic and conservative circles. Saramago, an atheist, said he had written a novel, not a treatise on theology.4 sources

In April 1992 Portugal had to name candidates for the European Literary Prize, an award of the European Community. On 14 April the national book institute, the IPLL, suggested Saramago, the poet Pedro Tamen and Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão. António Sousa Lara, under-secretary of state for culture in Aníbal Cavaco Silva's Social Democratic (PSD) government, left Saramago off. The names sent were Tamen, Fiama and Agustina Bessa-Luís.3 sources

Público broke the story on 25 April 1992. Sousa Lara told the paper that the book did not represent Portugal. In parliament he argued that the novel attacked the religious heritage of the Portuguese and, far from uniting them, divided them.3 sources

The row spread to Spanish, French and Italian newspapers; the French culture minister, Jack Lang, called it unacceptable. Tamen and Fiama withdrew. The secretary of state for culture, Pedro Santana Lopes, overruled Sousa Lara and promised a new jury, but Saramago asked not to be considered and the jury never met. The novel sold 135,000 copies in Portugal by 21 May, and the 1992 prize went to the Spanish novelist Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.1 source

On 1 May 1992, a week after the story broke, Saramago and his second wife, the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río, whom he had married in 1988, visited her sister on Lanzarote, and Pilar suggested they move there. They settled on the island in February 1993, in a house in Tías.4 sources

At the time Saramago told Público the timing was a coincidence he had not sought; in his Nobel autobiography he gave the government's “censorship” as the reason. Pilar del Río has said the row played a part, but that the two things mostly coincided.2 sources

On Lanzarote he began a diary, Cadernos de Lanzarote, and wrote Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (1995), in which an epidemic of blindness strikes a population and society falls apart. The same year he received the Camões Prize. Todos os Nomes followed in 1997.3 sources

As was its custom, the Swedish Academy had promised the name for “a Thursday in October”, without fixing the date. In 1998 the announcement came at 1 pm in Stockholm, noon in Portugal. For years Saramago had been on the unofficial waiting list, along with António Lobo Antunes, Salman Rushdie, Mario Vargas Llosa and Jorge Amado. The year before, he and Pilar had heard on the kitchen radio that the prize had gone to Dario Fo.1 source

The press release noted that he would be 76 in November, came from a working-class background and had his first big success only at 60. It picked out Memorial do Convento as the breakthrough and said Ensaio sobre a Cegueira added “appreciably” to his stature. In Portuguese the Academy's citation read “que, com parábolas portadoras de imaginação, compaixão e ironia torna constantemente compreensível uma realidade fugidia”.2 sources

Politicians and intellectuals welcomed the news. President Jorge Sampaio, as Público reported it, called the prize “the definitive consecration of Portuguese” and thanked him, whatever anyone's politics, for “a great collective satisfaction”. The French news agency AFP wrote of a wave of national pride in a year that had already brought Expo 98 in Lisbon and a place in the first wave of the euro.1 source

Not everyone joined in. The Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano objected to the choice of “an inveterate communist”. Sousa Lara told Público he did not regret his decision on the Gospel, though as a citizen he was glad a Portuguese writer had won. In Mafra, the town his novel had made famous, the Social Democrat majority had blocked since April 1993 a proposal to give him the municipality's gold medal.2 sources

On 7 December 1998 Saramago gave his Nobel lecture to more than 400 people in the hall of the Swedish Academy. He called it De como a personagem foi mestre e o autor seu aprendiz, “How characters became the masters and the author their apprentice”. He began with his grandfather.3 sources

Jerónimo got up at four in the morning to take his pigs to pasture; in hard winters he and Josefa took the weakest piglets into their own bed to keep them alive. From there Saramago walked through his books one character at a time: the painter of the Manual, the Alentejo labourers, Baltasar and Blimunda, Ricardo Reis, the proofreader, Jesus. He also attacked a Church he called “both accomplice and beneficiary” of the power of the state and the landlords under the dictatorship.2 sources

Three days later, on 10 December, he received the prize at the Stockholm Concert Hall. Presenting him, Kjell Espmark of the Swedish Academy said Saramago allowed the laws of nature to be broken in one decisive respect only, then followed the consequences with strict logic and exact observation: a peninsula breaks loose, or a proofreader slips one word into a history book.1 source

After the prize he travelled across five continents, giving lectures and collecting honorary degrees, and he kept writing: A Caverna in 2000, Ensaio sobre a Lucidez, a sequel to Blindness, in 2004, As Intermitências da Morte in 2005, a memoir, As Pequenas Memórias, in 2006, A Viagem do Elefante in 2008. Caim (2009), with God as one of its main characters, started another row with the Church. Fernando Meirelles filmed Blindness in 2008.3 sources

In June 2007 he set up the Fundação José Saramago in Lisbon. Its Declaration of Principles, which he signed on 29 June 2007, binds it to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to the environment as well as to literature. In July 2008 Lisbon City Council granted it the upper floors of the Casa dos Bicos, a sixteenth-century noble house facing the river.3 sources

Saramago died at home on Lanzarote on Friday 18 June 2010, aged 87. Portugal's government declared two days of national mourning, and three days were declared on the Canaries. A military plane carrying the culture minister, Gabriela Canavilhas, and his daughter, Violante, brought his body to Lisbon. It lay in state at the city hall until noon on Sunday and was cremated at the Alto de São João cemetery.3 sources

On 18 June 2011, a year to the day after his death, his ashes were laid beside an olive tree brought from Azinhaga and planted in front of the Casa dos Bicos. A stone next to it carries a line from Memorial do Convento: “Mas não subiu para as estrelas, se à terra pertencia”, roughly “But he did not rise to the stars, since he belonged to the earth” (our translation).2 sources

Saramago was the first writer in Portuguese to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Portuguese speakers had won Nobels before: Egas Moniz for medicine in 1949, and Bishop Ximenes Belo and José Ramos-Horta of East Timor for peace in 1996. In Frankfurt Saramago said he hoped the prize would make people defend the language at home and spread it abroad.2 sources

His reach grew. When he won, his books had been translated into more than 25 languages; by his death, RTP reported, they were published in more than 30 countries. His foundation's lists now run to dozens of countries and languages, from Albanian to Vietnamese. In 2016 it gave the National Library of Portugal his manuscripts, typescripts, notebooks and letters.4 sources

The 1992 veto still divides the people involved. In 2017 Artur Anselmo, who had run the book institute, called it a regrettable intrusion of politics into culture; Sousa Lara said he would veto the book again. What RTP called the state's “reconciliation” with Saramago came in April 2004, over lunch with the prime minister, José Manuel Durão Barroso.2 sources