JOSÉ SARAMAGO was born in Portugal in 1922. His oeuvre embraces plays, poetry, memoirs and several novels which have been translated into more than forty languages. It was the publication in 1988 of Baltasar & Blimunda that first brought him to the attention of an English-speaking readership. This novel won the Portuguese PEN Club Award, as did his next, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, which also won the Independent Foreign Fiction Award. His subsequent novels have established him as one of Europe’s most influential living writers. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
GIOVANNI PONTIERO, formerly Reader in Latin-American Literature in the University of Manchester, was Saramago’s regular English translator. His translation of The Gospel according to Jesus Christ was awarded the Teixeira-Gomes Prize for Portuguese translation. He was also the principal English translator of the works of Clarice Lispector. He died in 1996.