He was the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony [with which he] continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality.

"[1] His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the theopoetic human factor.

[5][6] A proponent of libertarian communism,[7] Saramago criticized institutions such as the Catholic Church, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

Saramago was born in 1922 into a family of very poor landless peasants in Azinhaga, Portugal, a small village in Ribatejo Province, some one hundred kilometres northeast of Lisbon.

"Saramago", the Portuguese word for Raphanus raphanistrum (wild radish), was the insulting nickname given to his father, and was accidentally incorporated into his name by the village clerk upon registration of his birth.

By that time, in 1968, he met and became lover of writer Isabel da Nóbrega, the longtime partner of author and critic João Gaspar Simões.

Nóbrega became Saramago's devoted literary mentor, to whom he would later dedicate Memorial do Convento and O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis.

After the democratic revolution in 1974, on 9 April 1975, during the rule of Vasco Gonçalves, Saramago became the assistant director of the newspaper Diário de Notícias, and the editorial line became clearly pro-communist.

A baroque tale set during the Inquisition in 18th-century Lisbon, it tells of the love between a maimed soldier and a young clairvoyant, and of a renegade priest's heretical dream of flight.

Following acclaimed novels such as The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis and The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Saramago was hailed by literary critics for his complex yet elegant style, his broad range of references and his wit.

The multilayered The History of the Siege of Lisbon deals with the uncertainty of historical events and includes the story of a middle-aged isolated proofreader who falls in love with his boss.

[15] In 1986 Saramago met a Spanish intellectual and journalist, Pilar del Río, 27 years his junior, and he promptly ended his relationship with Isabel Nóbrega, his partner since 1968.

[19] Members of the country's Catholic community were outraged by Saramago's representation of Jesus and particularly God as fallible, even cruel human beings.

Portugal's conservative government, led by then-prime minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva, did not allow Saramago's work to compete for the Aristeion Prize,[9] arguing that it offended the Catholic community.

[23] His family said that he had breakfast and chatted with his wife and translator Pilar del Río on Friday morning, after which he started feeling unwell and died.

[24] The Guardian described him as "the finest Portuguese writer of his generation",[23] while Fernanda Eberstadt of The New York Times said he was "known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction".

[5] Saramago's English language translator, Margaret Jull Costa, paid tribute to his "wonderful imagination," calling him "the greatest contemporary Portuguese writer".

[7][8] There were tributes from senior international politicians: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Brazil), Bernard Kouchner (France) and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (Spain), while Cuba's Raúl and Fidel Castro sent flowers.

[7] Saramago's funeral was held in Lisbon on 20 June 2010, in the presence of more than 20,000 people, many of whom had travelled hundreds of kilometres, but also notably in the absence of right-wing President of Portugal Aníbal Cavaco Silva, who was holidaying in the Azores as the ceremony took place.

[26] Mourners, who questioned Cavaco Silva's absence in the presence of reporters,[8] held copies of the red carnation, symbolic of Portugal's democratic revolution.

[9] In his novel Blindness, Saramago completely abandons the use of proper nouns, instead referring to characters simply by some unique characteristic, an example of his style reflecting the recurring themes of identity and meaning found throughout his work.

His characters struggle with their need to connect with one another, form relations and bond as a community, and also with their need for individuality, and to find meaning and dignity outside of political and economic structures.

The Catholic Church criticised him on numerous occasions due to the content of some of his novels, mainly The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Cain, in which he uses satire and biblical quotations to present the figure of God in a comical way.

[31] Saramago was also a candidate of the Democratic Unity Coalition in all elections of the European Parliament from 1989 to 2009, though he ran for positions of which it was thought he had no possibility of winning.

According to The Independent, "Saramago aims to cut through the web of 'organized lies' surrounding humanity, and to convince readers by delivering his opinions in a relentless series of unadorned, knock-down prose blows.

will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner.

"[4] During the 2006 Lebanon War, Saramago joined Tariq Ali, John Berger, Noam Chomsky, and others in condemning what they characterized as "a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation".

[9] The Nobel committee praised his "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony", and his "modern skepticism" about official truths.