António Lobo Antunes, great author of Portuguese literature, dies

BarcelonaThe writer António Lobo Antunes, one of the most important authors in the Portuguese language, died this Thursday at the age of 83. In 2007 he received the Camões Prize, the most prestigious award for Portuguese literature, and was for years a perennial Nobel Prize candidate. His work displays great psychological depth with original, poetic, and complex prose, offering a portrait of Portuguese society in the last century. The Portuguese government has stated that "his legacy is a chronicle of humanity." Among his most outstanding titles are Exhortation to the crocodiles, The splendor of Portugal and Don't rush into this dark night.

Lobo Antunes (Lisbon, 1942) was born and raised in an aristocratic family living on the outskirts of Lisbon, in a rich house located in a poor neighborhood, as he had described in autobiographical novels such as About the rivers that flowThe son of a prestigious neurologist, he graduated in medicine and then, at the age of 26, was called up to the army as a doctor in the colonial war in Angola, from 1971 to 1973. There he met Ernesto Melo Antunes, one of the leaders of the Carnation Revolution, with which Lobo Antunes became involved. The war marked all his literature and was a recurring theme in novels such as The splendor of Portugal (Proa, 1999), one of the most exceptional.

In works such as On the Nature of the Gods He indirectly portrayed his youth in the Cascais mansion under his father's influence and the shadow of the war. "It was a war of children; the soldiers were between 18 and 21 years old, and the officers up to 25," he recalled during a visit to Barcelona in 2019. The writer admitted that he was "very afraid" and considered going to Paris to "start the revolution from the cafés," but feared he would never be able to return to his country. His experience as a second lieutenant appears in other books, and another work from that period was also published. Letters from the warThe letters he sent to his first wife, already pregnant, perhaps made him sympathetic to the Catalan cause. In 2014 he signed in favor of the right to self-determination, and in 2021 he spoke out in defense of amnesty for political prisoners and exiles. The author knew Barcelona well and had friends like Juan Marsé, Anna Maria Moix, and Carmen Balcells. "There are two things worthwhile in this life: love and friendship; the rest is bullshit," he stated during that visit.

Lobo Antunes practiced psychiatry until he abandoned it entirely for literature. In fact, his first book, published in 1979, Elephant memoryIt featured a Lisbon psychiatrist with literary aspirations who narrates his existential and identity crisis. He quickly became such a prolific author—that same year he also published his second novel, In the middle of nowhere— as valued and internationally recognized. Most of his titles are available in Spanish, and some of his most outstanding works have also been translated into Catalan, such as Manual of the Inquisitors (Editions 62, 1998), Exhortation to the crocodiles (Proa, 2000) and Don't rush into this dark night (Proa, 2002).

Memory was the driving force behind his writing, leading him to address, in a fragmentary way—with a swarm of scenes, phrases, characters, and places that the reader must piece together—themes such as loneliness, old age, death, love, and madness, as well as war. "The images come to me without me quite knowing how or from where," he said. He had also written about bullfighting (What horses are those that cast shadows on the sea?) and about the cancer he had suffered (About the rivers that flow"During the writing process, there are moments of great fulfillment, and these moments alone make writing worthwhile," the author proclaimed. He also stated, "I am only Lobo Antunes when I write." This is what will remain for posterity.