Mr. Saramago was an outspoken man who antagonized many. He moved to the Canary Islands after a public spat in 1992 with the Portuguese government, which he accused of censorship.
His 1998 Nobel Prize was nonetheless widely cheered in his homeland after decades in which the award eluded writers of a language used by some 170 million people around the world.
“People used to say about me, ‘He’s good but he’s a communist.’ Now they say, ‘He’s a communist but he’s good,’ ’’ he said in a 1998 interview.
Prime Minister José Sócrates of Portugal said Mr. Saramago was “one of our great cultural figures, and his disappearance has left our culture poorer.’’
Born in the town of Azinhaga near Lisbon, Mr. 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 poorly but won Mr. Saramago enough recognition to allow him to jump from the welder’s shop to a job on a literary magazine.
But for the next 18 years Mr. Saramago published only a few travel and poetry books while he worked as a journalist.
“I suppose I came to the conclusion I had nothing worth telling,’’ he said of that period.
He returned to fiction only after the four-decade dictatorship created by Antonio Salazar was toppled by a military uprising in 1974.
International critical acclaim came late in his life, starting with his 1982 historical fantasy “Memorial do Convento,’’ published in English in 1988 as “Baltasar and Blimunda.’’
The story is set during the Inquisition and explores the battle between individuals and organized religion, picking up Mr. Saramago’s recurring theme of the loner struggling against authority.
That kind of conflict surfaced in the heated clash Mr. Saramago had in 1992 with Portugal’s undersecretary of state for culture, Antonio Sousa Lara. The incident prompted Mr. Saramago’s move to the Spanish islands off northwest Africa.
