Portuguese writer wins Nobel prize

STOCKHOLM, OCT 8: Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago was named the winner of the 1998 Nobel Literature Prize today. Saramago, 75, wrote hi...

STOCKHOLM, OCT 8: Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago was named the winner of the 1998 Nobel Literature Prize today. Saramago, 75, wrote his breakthrough novel in 1982, Baltasar And Blimunda. Perhaps his best-known work is The Stone Raft, in which the Iberian peninsula breaks off from Europe for supernatural reasons and floats off into the Atlantic.

That device allows him to comment ironically “about the authorities and politicians, perhaps especially about the major players in power politics.”

Saramago is the fourth consecutive European to win the prestigious prize. 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.

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According to the terms of Nobel’s will, the literature prize is to recognize writing that works `in an ideal direction.” How to interpret that term has been widely debated. The Nobel Prize over the years has been givento writers with world-views 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 Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, as shy and delicate as Fo is boisterous.

The Swedish Academy does not reveal who was nominated or who it considered on its shortlist. Nominations can be made by previous laureates, professors of history and literature, members of the academy and presidents of some national authors’ organisations.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine winner will be announced on October 12, the Physics and Chemistry winners on October 13, the Economics laureate on October 14 and the Peace prize on October 16. All the prize announcements are in Stockholm, except for thePeace prize which is given in Oslo, Norway.