António Lobo Antunes died on Thursday, March 5, at the age of 83. Considered one of the greatest writers of contemporary Portuguese literature, he built a unique body of work over more than four decades, marked by intense language, memories of the colonial war, and a profound exploration of the human condition, according to the newspaper Expresso.
Born in Lisbon in 1942, he graduated in medicine and was mobilized as a military doctor to Angola during the colonial war, an experience that had a decisive influence on his writing. He made his literary debut in 1979 with Memória de Elefante (Elephant Memory), published in the same year as Os Cus de Judas (The Asses of Judas), a novel that quickly established him as one of the most powerful voices in Portuguese fiction.
His work, translated into several languages, includes titles such as Conhecimento do Inferno (Knowledge of Hell), Manual dos Inquisidores (Manual of the Inquisitors), Boa Tarde às Coisas Aqui em Baixo (Good Afternoon to Things Down Here) and Eu Hei-de Amar uma Pedra (I Will Love a Stone). Over more than four decades, he has built his own literary universe, marked by fragmented narratives, multiple voices, and demanding writing that has renewed Portuguese fiction.
Author of more than three dozen novels, Lobo Antunes was for decades considered a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Despite announcing several times that he would stop writing, he always returned to work. “Imagination does not exist. What exists is memory. The way we arrange the materials of memory,” he said in an interview with the newspaper Expresso.
Lobo Antunes wrote by hand, in small handwriting, before typing his texts onto A4 sheets. In several interviews, he explained that he never made plans for his novels. “The images come to me, I don’t know how or where from,” he said in one of these conversations, insisting that memory was the real driving force behind his writing.
In 2023, António Lobo Antunes was named by Expresso among the 50 figures chosen to mark the newspaper’s 50th anniversary, highlighting the unique place he occupies in contemporary Portuguese literature and the intensity of his relationship with writing.
His death marks the passing of one of the greatest figures in Portuguese literature in recent decades.
