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Nobel Prize winning author, José Saramago, has died
The Portuguese Nobel Prize winning writer, José Saramago, died at his home in Tías, Lanzarote on Friday, at the age of 87. He had been fighting leukaemia for three years.
Thought by many to be the literary soul of the left, he split his time between his Spanish home on the island of Lanzarote and his home in the Portuguese capital.
His wife, Pilar del Río, read out some lines from his 1991 work, ‘El Evangelio según Jesucristo’, over his coffin as she said goodbye to the man who had been at her side for the past 20 years. Saramago felt real passion for her, and stopped all the clocks in his home at the time that he met her. An intellectual who defended what he thought to be the just, until the last moment.
‘We won’t change the world, if we don’t change our own lives first’, he said.
There has been an avalanche of tributes, with Saturday’s El País dedicating no fewer than eight pages to him. It includes tributes from both the Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and the leader of the Partido Popular, Mariano Rajoy. The paper says that he was a poet before becoming a successful novelist, and before becoming a poet he was poor.
He was a friend of Judge Baltasar Garzón and in his last post to his blog, Saramago wrote, ‘The destiny of Judge Baltasar Garzón is in the hands of the Spanish people, and not in those of the bad judges the portraits of whom were done by an anonymous 15th century Portuguese painter’.
The Judge described Saramango as ‘an indispensible reference for ethics, in a society without moral references’, and said he was ‘a man embarked on a permanent denuncia’ .
His body was taken from the Canaries on Saturday to be cremated in Lisbon on Sunday.
Thought by many to be the literary soul of the left, he split his time between his Spanish home on the island of Lanzarote and his home in the Portuguese capital.
His wife, Pilar del Río, read out some lines from his 1991 work, ‘El Evangelio según Jesucristo’, over his coffin as she said goodbye to the man who had been at her side for the past 20 years. Saramago felt real passion for her, and stopped all the clocks in his home at the time that he met her. An intellectual who defended what he thought to be the just, until the last moment.
‘We won’t change the world, if we don’t change our own lives first’, he said.
There has been an avalanche of tributes, with Saturday’s El País dedicating no fewer than eight pages to him. It includes tributes from both the Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and the leader of the Partido Popular, Mariano Rajoy. The paper says that he was a poet before becoming a successful novelist, and before becoming a poet he was poor.
He was a friend of Judge Baltasar Garzón and in his last post to his blog, Saramago wrote, ‘The destiny of Judge Baltasar Garzón is in the hands of the Spanish people, and not in those of the bad judges the portraits of whom were done by an anonymous 15th century Portuguese painter’.
The Judge described Saramango as ‘an indispensible reference for ethics, in a society without moral references’, and said he was ‘a man embarked on a permanent denuncia’ .
His body was taken from the Canaries on Saturday to be cremated in Lisbon on Sunday.
(You can find a photo for this story at Typically Spanish - Click here)