António Lobo Antunes, the Portuguese author who explored the social complexities of his native country in more than 30 works of fiction, has died at 83, the New York Times reports.
Antunes was born in Lisbon and educated at the University of Lisbon. He later worked as a psychiatrist, serving in Portugal’s army as a medic during the Portuguese Colonial War.
He made his literary debut in 1979 with two novels, Elephant’s Memory and The Land at the End of the World. His other novels include An Explanation of the Birds, Act of the Damned, The Return of the Caravels, The Inquisitor’s Manual, Knowledge of Hell, and What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire? He won several literary honors over the course of his career, including the Ovid Prize, Jerusalem Prize, and the Juan Rulfo Prize, and was frequently mentioned as a potential winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In a 2008 interview with the Brooklyn Rail, Antunes reflected on his writing process, saying, “A book is finished when it does not want me to work on it any longer.…I see a book as a living organism, with its own rules and will. What matters to me is to allow it to grow and to acquire an existence of its own. It’s as if the book uses me in order to come into existence, rather than being written.”
Portugal declared a day of national mourning for Antunes, Agence France-Presse reports, with the country’s president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, saying, “Antonio Lobo Antunes wrote all his work as a novelist, but also as a columnist, in a register of incisive tenderness, placing side by side the pain and failure of ordinary lives with political tragedies, excess and empathy.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
