José Saramago

Saramago grew up poor in rural Portugal, left school young for lack of money, and worked for decades as a mechanic, translator, journalist, and publishing editor before fiction became his living. He joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969 and stayed a member the rest of his life; a slim early novel in 1947 was followed by nearly two decades of near-silence as a novelist.

He was almost sixty when Baltasar and Blimunda (1982) announced the fully formed style, flooding, unpunctuated sentences with no quotation marks, that carried him through Blindness and a Nobel Prize in 1998, the first for a Portuguese-language writer. After the Portuguese government blocked The Gospel According to Jesus Christ from a European literary prize over its heterodox treatment of Christ, he left in protest for Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, where he lived and wrote until his death in 2010.