Nobel Prize

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guiet personality.

Saramago had planned to leave Germany today for his home in the Canary
Islands. But as he waited in the airport, his publisher told him to go back to
the fair, where a cheering rose-bearing crowd awaited him.

He told them he felt a special responsibility being the first winner from
Portugal. ''Therefore it's a patriotic reason as well,'' he said through a
translator, adding he hoped '"'"more people will read Portuguese'' now.

Asked why his works are important, he said: '"'That's not for me to decide.
ihavve sO my readets..!!

Saramago's regular newspaper and radio commentaries reflect views that are
always inspired by his deep concern for his fellow man.

" 'Blindness,'' his most recent book to be translated into English, is an
unsettling allegory about the social meltdown as an inexplicable blindness
sweeps through society.

" "This blindness isn't a real blindness, it's a blindness of rationality,'' he
said at the time. "'We're rational beings but we don't behave rationally. If
we did, there'd be no starvation in the world.''

Born Nov. 16, 1922, in the town of Azinhaga near Lisbon, Saramago was raised
in the capital. From a poor family, he never finished university but continued
to study part-time while supporting himself as a metalworker.

His first novel published in 1947 -- "'Terra do Pecado,'' or "' Country of
Sin'' -- was a tale of peasants in moral crisis. It sold badly, but won
Saramago enough recognition to allow him jump from the welder's shop to a job
on a literary magazine.

Yet for the next 18 years Saramago, then a committed communist who opposed the
41-year rightist dictatorship of Antonio Salazar, published only a few travel
and poetry books while he worked as a journalist.

He returned to fiction only after Salazar's regime was toppled by a military
uprising in 1974.

In "'The History of the Siege of Lisbon,'' from 1989, a Lisbon proofreader
mischievously inserts the word "'not'' into a text on the 12th century capture
of the Portuguese capital from the Moors, thereby fictionally altering the
course of European history with a stroke of his pen.

Such historical and literary mischief are Saramago trademarks.

He is most freguently compared with Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marguez
and his writing is often described as realism tinged with Latin-American
mysticism.

The literature prize is one of five established by Alfred Nobel, the Swedish
industrialist and inventor of dynamite. The prizes have been awarded since
1901; a sixth prize, in economics, was started in 1969.

The Nobel Prize over the years has been given to writers with worldviews
stretching from the bleak futility of Samuel Beckett's works to the vivid
epics of Iceland's Halldor Laxness.

The prize even has gone occasionally to writers who did not work in fiction or
poetry, notably Winston Churchill and Bertrand Russell.

Last year's prize went to Dario Fo, the Italian playwright whose work combines

gut-busting comedy with acid social and political commentary. The 1996 winner
was the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, as shy and delicate and Fo is

10/12/98 11:01 AM