Do we like them?

Do we like José Saramago?

Our score: 8 out of 10. A lifetime on the side of the dispossessed, a decent record as a person, and one reckless comparison he never walked back.

Saramago was born into a family of landless peasants in rural Portugal and went on to become the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1998. He died in 2010, aged 87, at home in the Canary Islands. Obituaries described a writer who mixed fantasy, fact and folklore, and that's the through-line of everything he did.

His most famous fight was at home. His novel about Jesus, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, upset the Portuguese Catholic community, and the government of the day reportedly pulled it from a European literary prize shortlist. He then left for Lanzarote. Whichever side you take on the book, he lost something real for putting it out there.

The ugliest stoush came in 2002, when he visited Ramallah with a writers' delegation and compared the situation of Palestinians to Auschwitz. Ilan Stavans, writing in The Nation, still admires his work but called the analogy reckless, and some Israeli readers returned his books to shops. Saramago denied being an anti-Semite and told Ha'aretz that an intellectual's job is to make shocking, emotional comparisons. He neither retracted it nor apologised. Where you land depends on whether you read it as bearing witness or as a cheap shot at Holocaust memory.

On the harm check, I found no words or campaigns of his against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet. Honestly, the search turned up very little either way on those topics, so treat that as a gap rather than a gold star. What did come up was a lifelong lean towards the left and the poor, plus his decades-long support for the Castro government in Cuba, which he publicly broke from in 2003 after executions there.

The recent noise is about school reading lists. A preliminary proposal in Portugal would remove his work from the mandatory secondary-school list while adding other authors. The Saramago Foundation asked for his name to stay, alongside another writer rather than replaced by him. It's still preliminary and in public consultation, so nothing is settled.

Overall he's the sort of writer you can admire without squirming, apart from the Ramallah remark. He stood by the people at the bottom of the heap, and he paid for his convictions with a move abroad. One awkward, defended analogy keeps him from top marks, but it doesn't make him a villain.