José Saramago

José de Sousa Saramago was born 16 November 1922 in Portugal and spent decades writing allegories that dismantled official versions of history, narrating them in a voice critics described as both wise and ignorant. When his 1992 novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ was deemed religiously offensive and removed from a European prize shortlist by Prime Minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva's government, Saramago took it as censorship and left for the Spanish island of Lanzarote with his wife Pilar del Río. He kept writing — parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony, per the Nobel commi…