António Lobo Antunes, Portuguese novelist, dies aged 83

António Lobo Antunes, the Portuguese novelist whose dark, polyphonic fiction confronted the traumas of dictatorship, war and Portuguese society, has died aged 83. Widely regarded as one of the most important Portuguese writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, he produced more than 30 novels that reshaped Portuguese writing and made him a perennial contender for the Nobel prize for literature.

He received numerous honours, including the Camões prize, the most prestigious award in the Portuguese language, and several major European literary prizes. Born in Lisbon in 1942 into a middle-class family, he was the son of a neurologist and trained as a psychiatrist, working in hospitals for several years.

Drafted in the early 1970s, he served as an army doctor in Angola during Portugal’s colonial war, an experience that marked him profoundly: "There I learned that I wasn’t the centre of the world and that others existed," he later told a journalist. He returned to Lisbon in 1973, practising psychiatry and writing in the evenings.

Portugal, Lisbon

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