Guest of the ilb 2007
António Lobo Antunes
was born in Lisbon in 1942 and grew up in the Benfica district. His
parents belonged to the upper middle classes. He studied medicine in
his home city, specialising in psychiatry. From 1971 to 1973, during
the colonial war in Angola, he worked as a military doctor. After his
return he worked as a psychiatrist at the psychiatric clinic Hospital
de Miguel Bombarda in Lisbon. He began writing his first two novels,
»Memória de Elefante« (t: Elephant’s memory) and »Os Cus de Judas«
(Eng. »South of Nowhere«, 1983), in 1976. Both were published in 1979
and made their author famous overnight in Portugal. They deal with his
experiences in the war and in his professional life, as do many of his later works. He has been a freelance writer since 1985.
Lobo Antunes has been on the cards for a Nobel
Prize for years. His novels have an inimitable style; artistic, complex
and occasionally labyrinthine in construction, they are characterised
by frequent shifts in perspective and pacing. Quite often, events that
occur across a broad period of time will be dealt with in a tightly compressed
form in the text. His works deal with Portugal in history and today,
and concentrate on borderline or unimportant lives. Verena Auffermann
summed Lobo Antunes up, commenting that he has »in his own way,
understanding politics as human fate, written the social history of
Portugal from the colonial war in Angola, through the Salazar
dictatorship and the Carnation Revolution of 1975, up to today’s prosperity following EU membership«.
To date, the author has written over 20 books.
Among the most important are »Fado Alexandrino« (1983; Eng. 1990), »As
Naus« (1988; Eng. »The Return of the Caravels«, 2002) and »Manual dos
Inquisidores« (1996; Eng. »The Inquisitor’s Manual«, 2003). Since 1998
his »Crónicas« – often autobiographical pieces for the Sunday
supplement of the Portuguese daily newspaper »Público« and later for
the weekly »Visão« – have been appearing in book form. By now there are
three volumes. In 2005 his daughters Maria José and Joana published the
letters which Lobo Antunes sent to his wife while he was in Angola
under the title »D'este viver aqui neste papel descripto: cartas de
guerra« (2005; t: Life, written on paper: Letters from the war). A year
later his most recent novel, »Ontem não te vi em Babilónia« (t:
Yesterday I haven’t seen you in Babylon), was published.
Lobo Antunes’ works have been translated into more than thirty languages and honoured with numerous prizes
and awards, including the Grande Prémio de Romance e Novela of the
Portuguese Writers’ Association, the Prêmio Franco-Português, the
Austrian State Award for European Literature, the Jerusalem Prize, and
most recently the Prémio Camões, the most prestigious prize
of the Portuguese-speaking countries. In 2007 he was awarded an
honorary doctorate by the university Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro. Lobo
Antunes lives in Lisbon.
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