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5 unusual facts about José Saramago


2011 Portuguese protests

This small group of young people gathered with other activists to create a movement with the objective to "Make every citizen a politician", a sentence from the Portuguese Nobel Prize José Saramago.

Armindo Freitas-Magalhães

He founded the National Front for the Defense of Culture (Lisbon, 1992) with among others José Saramago.

Betina Gonzalez

Among the panelists of the selection committee for Arte Menor were internationally known writers such as Nobel laureate José Saramago, Rosa Montero, and Eduardo Belgrano Rawson.

Leslie Bethell

He was nominated to fill the vacancy left by the death of the Portuguese author José Saramago, and was only the second English person to have been elected to the position, after the philosopher Herbert Spencer.

Maria Anna of Austria

Maria Anna, along with her husband and children, is a central character in José Saramago's novel Baltasar and Blimunda (1987).


Cristina Pacheco

With the show Conversando, con Cristina Pacheco, she profiles people in the arts and popular culture such as writers, musicians, artists, artisans, sports figures, which have included Portuguese writer José Saramago, Catalan lyricist Joan Manuel Serrat, painters Juan Soriano and Perro Aguayo .

Divara van Haarlem

The opera Divara - Wasser und Blut (Water and Blood) by José Saramago and Azio Corghi was based upon her.

Irene Vilar

She founded her own literary agency, Vilar Creative Agency, and serves as a co-agent in the United States for Ray-Gude Mertin Literary Agency, an agency specializing in Spanish, Latin American, and Portuguese authors, which represented such notable writers as 1998 Nobel Prize laureate Jose Saramago.

Luiz Pacheco

The Portuguese television channel RTP 2 broadcast a biographical documentary about his life, filmed in his last years, where Nobel laureate in Literature José Saramago, former Portuguese statesman Mário Soares, and Luiz Pacheco himself, among other figures, commented the writer's eccentric life and work.

Mafra, Portugal

Built in the baroque style, the Mafra National Palace also inspired Portuguese Nobel Prize laureate José Saramago to write his novel Baltasar and Blimunda (Memorial do Convento).

Porto Alegre Manifesto

The signatures of the manifesto (so-called "Group of Nineteen") are Aminata Traoré, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Eduardo Galeano, José Saramago, François Houtart, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Armand Mattelart, Roberto Savio, Riccardo Petrella, Ignacio Ramonet, Bernard Cassen, Samir Amin, Atilio Boron, Samuel Ruiz Garcia, Tariq Ali, Frei Betto, Emir Sader, Walden Bello, and Immanuel Wallerstein.

The Cimarron Review

Cimarron Review has published authors such as Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, John Ashbery, Robert Olen Butler, Mark Doty, Diane Wakoski, Tess Gallagher, Richard Shelton, Richard Lyons, Rick Bass, Pam Houston, William Stafford, Paul Muldoon, Grace Schulman, and many others.

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor

This theme had been explored previously in fiction by Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe and the robinsonade genre) and Voltaire (Candide), and more recently by William Golding (Lord of the Flies and Pincher Martin), Umberto Eco (The Island of the Day Before), J.M. Coetzee (Foe), José Saramago (The Stone Raft and The Tale of the Unknown Island).

This is Not a Book

The assignment "random occurrence" is an homage to Marcel Duchamp, "window" is an homage to Yoko Ono, "chance operation" is an homage to John Cage, "conundrum" and "top secret document" are an homage to Oulipo, "bureaucracy" is an homage to José Saramago and "voyage" is an homage to Bas Jan Ader.


see also

José and Pilar

In 2007, Fernando Meirelles started shooting Blindess, an adaptation from José Saramago's eponymous book, starring Julianne Moore, Gael García Bernal and Mark Ruffalo.