He was described as one of the great innovators of Portuguese prose and was often mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize.
After training as a doctor, António Lobo Antunes became a full-time writer in the 1980s. He had served as a military doctor in Portugal's war in Angola and began writing seriously after returning to Lisbon. His professional experiences were reflected in his novels, which often confronted the country's colonial and nationalist past.
In the acclaimed “Benfica trilogy,” he depicted two families in a Portugal still characterized by António de Oliveira Salazar's authoritarian rule.
"You need three things to be able to write. Patience, solitude and a little pride. You have to have the latter not to be completely defeated by the book," he said in an interview with the Swedish news agency PM in 2006.
He wrote about twenty novels.
"A good book is written just for me. I have a personal relationship with the book. It belongs to me and I belong to it," said António Lobo Antunes.
