La Pléiade will publish a selection of the best works by António Lobo Antunes. The collection belongs to Gallimard, and owes its prestige to the select group of classics featured, as well as its unmistakably elegant binding.
Following in the footsteps of Philip Roth and Mario Vargas Llosa, António Lobo Antunes has joined the small group of writers who’ve received this honour during their lifetimes.
Admired by George Steiner, J.M. Coetzee and Harold Bloom and winner of multiple awards, the author of The Land at the End of the World and Fado Alexandrino began his literary career in the late 1970s. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages.
António Lobo Antunes (Lisbon, 1940) studied Medicine and practiced as a psychiatrist before being called in 1970 to serve as a military doctor in the Portuguese army during the Portuguese Colonial War. During that time, he met Ernesto Melo Antunes, one of the leaders of the subsequent Carnation Revolution, in which Lobo Antunes was also involved.
Profoundly marked by his experience of war, he quit psychiatry after returning to Lisbon to immerse himself in his literary work, which was soon recognised for its brilliance and originality. Lobo Antunes has become one of the most established and important figures in contemporary Portuguese literature.
Lobo Antunes is the second Portuguese writer to be included in La Pléiade, after Fernando Pessoa. Upon receiving the news, Antonio Lobo Antunes said that "being in La Pléiade is the greatest reward that a person who writes can receive," and dedicated the good news "to my friends, my readers, and my brother, José Cardoso Pires, who’ll be very happy, wherever he is."