THE epiphany occurred some time in the late 1970s, when José Saramago, tall, spare, ascetic, professorial in bearing though in fact self-taught, already in his mid-50s but not yet known, realised that ...

The Nobel laureate’s “Small Memories” is a mix of peasant life, boyhood adventure and wide-eyed wonder. By Gregory Cowles Gregory Cowles is a senior editor at the Book Review, where he has also been ...

All struggles, to a certain extent, involve uncertainty. And while they may take a variety of forms—from political revolutions to the more delicate act of interpreting a text—each entails an element ...

The struggle of the individual against bureaucracy and anonymity is one of the great subjects of modern literature, and Saramago is often matched with Kafka as one of its premier exponents. Apt as the ...

I am not a person who re-reads books. The world is too large, and life too short. A book re-read steals time away from a new book I have yet to discover, a book that on my death bed will have gone ...

Once upon a time — a time of civil war and spectacle, when Protestant fervor swept Europe and the Inquisition intimidated the faithful — an Indian elephant traveled on foot from Lisbon to Vienna. Four ...

Jose Saramago, the Portuguese novelist who died this past Friday at the age of 87, had a lot going for him and a lot going against him. In 1998, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and ...

Jose Saramago, the first Portuguese writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, died at his home in the Canary Islands on Friday. He was honored in his homeland as a major cultural figure, but as a ...

Not everybody likes winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Beckett thought it a catastrophe; Doris Lessing made it clear that she could have done without it; when the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska ...

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or ...

José Saramago, who has died aged 87, became the first Portuguese-language winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature; but although recognised as one of Portugal's best-selling modern writers, his ...