Jose Saramago was a voracious intellectual.

In 1998, the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize to Saramago, the first Portuguese writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He was honored in his homeland as a major cultural figure, but as a committed Communist, he attracted his share of controversy and Saramago moved to the Canary Islands in 1998 after a very public dispute with the Portuguese government.

At a banquet in Oslo celebrating the award, Saramago said he owed a great debt to all those who had written in Portuguese."The ones of the past and of today, I am but one of them," he
Saramago passed away at his home in Lanzarote. (When the Portuguese censored The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, published in 1991, he and his wife decided to move to the Canary Islands.)

Saramago was born into poverty in 1922 in a small village outside Lisbon. His parents were landless peasants who later moved to the city, where Saramago had the opportunity to go to school. Money troubles eventually forced him to drop out, but he never stopped educating himself. "He was an avid reader," says Helder Macedo, emeritus professor of Portuguese literature at Kings College London. Saramago was "indeed a voracious intellectual ... acquiring information as much as he could."

Saramago is known for his imaginative blend of fantasy, fact and folklore. He takes on big subjects and big themes: In The Stone Raft he envisions a world in which Spain and Portugal are literally cut off from the rest of Europe. In Blindness, which was also made into a movie, the entire population of a city loses its sight.

"It's not a 'Once upon a time,' but 'What if?' " Macedo says. "What if suddenly the world became blind? What if the Iberian Peninsula was geographically separated from Europe? He writes fables in a sense."... "who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality."

"He is a writer who divides people," says Margaret Jull Costa, who has translated many of Saramago's novels. "I think people either love him or hate him. ... He liked argument and he did antagonize people ... and he liked to be polemical."

At a banquet in Oslo celebrating the award, Saramago said he owed a great debt to all those who had written in Portuguese."The ones of the past and of today, I am but one of them," he said.