Novelist Antonio Lobo Antunes, one of the most read and translated Portuguese-language writers in the world, nominated several times for the Nobel Prize for Literature, has died, the Leya publishing group announced.
“His death has been confirmed. We will send a message of condolences”a spokeswoman for Leya, which published Antunes’ last novel in 2022, said to AFP, according to Agerpres.
A disillusioned chronicler of contemporary Portuguese society, Lobo Antunes is the author of a demanding body of work that includes novels, poetry and autobiography in a baroque and metaphorical style.
Twice married and the father of three daughters, he recovered from three cancer diagnoses and continued to write an average of one novel a year, but had recently stopped publishing new volumes.
According to a journalist to whom he had given a series of interviews, the writer would have suffered from a form of dementia, information that was not confirmed by his entourage.
Born in 1942 into a family belonging to the grand bourgeoisie of Lisbon, Lobo Antunes discovers, in the early 1970s, the horrors of the colonial war in Angola, where he is sent as a military doctor.
On returning from the front, he becomes a psychiatrist in a hospital in Lisbon and achieves success with his second novel, “Os Cus de Judas” (1979), the monologue of a man returning from the war. Since 1985, he has devoted himself exclusively to writing.
The universe of his characters reveals, with irony, the inner conflicts of a Portuguese society marked by 48 years of dictatorship and the disillusionment that followed the installation of democracy in 1974, especially in the novel “A Manual dos Inquisidores” (“The Inquisitor’s Handbook”) – 1996.
The author of about 30 novels and several collections of press articles, he was awarded in 2007 with the Camoes Prize, the most important literary distinction in the Portuguese language.
