António Lobo Antunes was born in 1942 in Lisbon. He studied medicine and served as a military doctor in Angola for 27 months during the Portuguese Colonial War, which lasted from 1961 to 1974. After the war, he worked as a psychiatrist in a Lisbon hospital.
His experiences in Angola deeply influenced his literary career, though the exact ways they shaped his themes and style remain unclear. From 1985 onward, Lobo Antunes dedicated himself exclusively to writing. He received numerous awards, including the Great Novel Prize of the Portuguese Writers' Association, the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society, and the Camões Prize, the most important literary award in the Portuguese-speaking world.
Despite this acclaim, Lobo Antunes anticipated that the Nobel Prize in Literature would ultimately elude him for years. In a 2019 interview with the Spanish newspaper 'El Mundo', Lobo Antunes said: 'Screw the Nobel Prize. ' His second novel 'The Kiss of Judas', published in 1979, is a monologue of a man who returned from the war in Angola and was celebrated by critics.
In novels such as 'The Death of Carlos Gardel', 'The Archipelago of Insomnia', 'The Handbook of the Inquisitors', and 'My Name Is Legion', Lobo Antunes always took the side of the victims and the oppressed. Recurring themes in his work were the power of memory, traumatic experiences, and thoughts of suicide. ' In 2014, Lobo Antunes overcame one of his three cancer illnesses and shortly thereafter published a very intense book describing the places and turns of his childhood: 'By the Rivers That Flow'.
The specific details of his three cancer illnesses are not publicly known. His last novel 'On the Other Shore of the Sea' revolved again around a lifelong trauma of the author, about the bloody Portuguese colonial policy. The critical and public receptions of this later novel have not been detailed in available reports.
His longtime translator Maralde Meyer-Minnemann once said that the work of Lobo Antunes is so difficult because one constantly encounters sad, broken figures. Lobo Antunes described himself as a 'tender and loving' but also 'introverted and plagued by doubts' person. He said: 'It's not easy for me to live with myself.
' Lobo Antunes compared his way of writing to a 'controlled delirium'. In recent years, Lobo Antunes barricaded himself in his house in Lisbon, and memories left him. The personal or health factors that led to this seclusion are not specified.
In 2012, Lobo Antunes announced that he considered his work complete, but he continued it nonetheless. He wrote: 'My work is practically finished. I have written the books I wanted to write, as I wanted to write them, and with what I wanted to say: I will not change a single line of what I have written, and even if I were given a hundred more years of life, I would not do it either.
' The exact date and status of his death have not been disclosed, but his legacy as a master of Portuguese literature endures through his impactful body of work.