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José Saramago has died at his home in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, his publisher said on Friday.

He was 87. The Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998 with novels that combine surrealist experimentation and a kind of sardonic peasant pragmatism,

The publisher, Zeferino Coelho of  Ediorial Caminho, told the Portuguese newspaper Público that Mr. Saramago’s health had been deteriorating after a recent illness,

José Saramago, a tall, commandingly austere man with a dry, schoolmasterly manner, gained international acclaim for novels like “Baltasar and Blimunda” and “Blindness".

José Saramago was the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize, and more than two million copies of his books have been sold, Mr. Coelho said.

Saramago was known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction. In later years, Mr. Saramago used his status as a Nobel laureate to deliver lectures at international congresses around the world, accompanied by his wife, the Spanish journalist Pilar del Rio.

He described globalization as the new totalitarianism and lamented contemporary democracy’s failure to stem the increasing powers of multinational corporations.

(Taken from: The New York Times)

Link: The New York Times about José Saramago