Nobel Prize in Literature Laureate. He received worldwide recognition, as a Portuguese author, after being awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature and according to the Nobel Prize committee, the coveted was awarded to "who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality." This award brought his writings to the United States. A prolific author, he published at least 24 books along with poetry, plays, and several volumes of essays and short stories, as well as autobiographical works. More than two million copies of Saramago's books have been sold in Portugal alone and his work has been translated into 25 languages. Born José de Sousa Saramago into a poor family of rural laborers, he was removed from public school at age 12 and sent to technical school to become a mechanic. After becoming a mechanic, he spent his free time in the public library educating himself. He married Ilda Reis, a typist and later artist, in 1944; they divorced in 1970. Their only child, Violante, a daughter, was born in 1947. In 1947 he published his first novel "The Land of Sin," but he took a nearly 20-year long sabbatical before attempt to write again. After holding a series of jobs, first as a mechanic, civil servant and metalworker, he accepted a position in a Lisbon publishing firm and eventually became a journalist and translator. In 1968, he became romantically involved of writer Isabel da Nóbrega, who became Saramago's devoted literary mentor. In 1982, he dedicated to da Nóbrega the love story, "Memorial do Convento." After this novel was translated to English in 1988 as "Baltasar and Blimunda," he became more internationally known at age 66. His nearly 20-year relationship with Isabel da Nóbrega did eventually end with him remarrying in 1988. He joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969, and his politics, as well as his atheistic thinking, spilled into his literature. . A proponent of libertarian communism, he criticized institutions such as the Catholic Church, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, and as an atheist, he defended love as an instrument to improve the human condition. From 1974 to 1975 after the revolution, he was an editor of a clearly pro-communist Lisbon newspaper and published several volumes of poems including "Possible Poems" in 1966 and "Probably Joy" in 1970. After an anticommunist movement came to power with Coup on November 25, 1975, he lost his editor position at age fifty and began to write novels. A collection of political writing was published in 1976 under the title ""Notes". Of all his novel, he is most recognized for his 1991 "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ," which was fictional re-telling of Jesus Christ's life with removing Jesus's deity and depicting him as a flawed, humanized character full of passions and doubts. In 1992, the Government of Portugal under Prime Minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva ordered the removal of one of his books, "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" from the Aristeion Prize's shortlist, claiming the work was religiously offensive. Disheartened by this political censorship of his work, he put himself into exile until his death on one of the Canary Islands, where he lived alongside his second wife Pilar del Río, a much younger Spanish author that he married in 1988. Saramago was a founding member of the National Front for the Defense of Culture in Lisbon in 1992 and co-founder with Orhan Pamuk of the European Writers' Parliament in 1977. Other works include "Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia" in 1977, "Objecto Quase" in 1978, "Levantado do Chão" in 1980 and "Viagem a Portugal" in 1981 and "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis" in 1984. For some years, Saramago suffered from leukemia Upon his death, Portugal declared two-day mourning period was issued with thousands of mourners at his funeral After cremation, his ashes were interred on the anniversary of his death, June 18, 2011, underneath a hundred-year-old olive tree on the square in front of the José Saramago Foundation. He received numerous accolades and honors including British Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his 1989 historical novel "The History of the Siege of Lisbon" and the Portuguese PEN Club Award three times. On August 24, 1985 he was awarded the rank of Commander of the Order of Saint James of the Sword, being elevated to Grand Collar of the same Order on December 3, 1998 . He was posthumously awarded the rank of Grand Collar of the Order of Camões on November 16, 2021.