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Authors by Country · PortugalThe Best Portuguese Authors to Read
Portuguese literature is shaped by the sea, by empire and by its loss. It runs from Camões’s sixteenth-century epic of the voyage to India, through the realist novels of Eça de Queirós and the many invented selves of Fernando Pessoa, to the novels that followed the 1974 Carnation Revolution and the end of the colonial wars in Africa. Lisbon, exile, memory and the weight of history recur throughout.
The list is ordered chronologically by year of birth and covers writers from Portugal; Brazilian writers appear on the Latin American page. Every author has at least one book in English translation, and the suggested starting point names the English title and, where it could be confirmed, the translator. Canonical names sit alongside living novelists.
Twelve Portuguese authors, and where to start with each
Luís de Camões
c. 1524–1580 · Lisbon (probably), Portugal
Camões is Portugal’s national poet. His epic Os Lusíadas, published in 1572, celebrates Portuguese seafaring through Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India around the Cape of Good Hope, mixing classical mythology with history across ten cantos in ottava rima. His sonnets, odes and elegies were collected after his death as Rimas (1595).
Much of his life is uncertain: his birth year is usually given as 1524 or 1525, and Lisbon, Coimbra and other towns all claim him. He died in Lisbon on 10 June 1580. An English translation of the epic by Richard Fanshawe appeared as early as 1655.
Read Camões if you want the founding epic of the Age of Discovery, told from the Portuguese side.
Start with The Lusiads (1572). Os Lusíadas: an epic of Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India and of Portuguese history, available in a 1997 English translation by Landeg White. Or The Collected Lyric Poems of Luís de Camões (1595). His sonnets and shorter poems, first collected as Rimas, translated by Landeg White (2008).
Eça de Queirós
1845–1900 · Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal
Eça de Queirós is the leading realist novelist of nineteenth-century Portugal. The Crime of Father Amaro (1875) takes on the provincial clergy, Cousin Bazilio (1878) the Lisbon middle-class household, and The Maias (1888) the idle aristocracy of 1870s Lisbon. He also wrote satirical fantasies such as The Mandarin (1880) and The Relic (1887).
He spent most of his adult life abroad as a consul, in Havana, Newcastle upon Tyne, Bristol and finally Paris, where he died in 1900. Margaret Jull Costa has retranslated his major novels for English readers.
Read Eça if you like the big nineteenth-century social novel with a satirical edge.
Start with The Maias (1888). Os Maias: in 1870s Lisbon the idle aristocrat Carlos da Maia falls in love with Maria Eduarda, with tragic consequences, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (2007), a translation that won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. Or Cousin Bazilio (1878). O Primo Basílio, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (2003); earlier versions by Roy Campbell (1953) and others exist.
Fernando Pessoa
1888–1935 · Lisbon, Portugal
Pessoa wrote under dozens of invented authors he called heteronyms, each with a biography and style: the nature poet Alberto Caeiro, the Horatian classicist Ricardo Reis, the restless engineer Álvaro de Campos, and the bookkeeper Bernardo Soares, to whom he assigned The Book of Disquiet. Identity, solitude and the self as a fiction run through all of them.
Raised partly in Durban, South Africa, he wrote in English as well as Portuguese. His poem cycle Mensagem appeared in 1934; The Book of Disquiet first appeared in 1982, nearly fifty years after his death.
Read Pessoa if you are drawn to writing about the divided self and the inner life of a city.
Start with The Book of Disquiet (1982). Livro do Desassossego: fragments of a Lisbon clerk’s inner life, credited to Bernardo Soares, translated by Richard Zenith (2001) and by Margaret Jull Costa (complete edition, 2017). Or Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems (1998). A selection of poems by Pessoa and his heteronyms, edited and translated by Richard Zenith.
All Fernando Pessoa books →Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen
1919–2004 · Porto, Portugal
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen wrote poetry of light, sea and Greek antiquity, beginning with Poesia in 1944 and continuing through Livro Sexto (1962), Geografia (1967) and O Búzio de Cós (1997). She also wrote short stories, collected in Contos Exemplares (1962), and children’s books such as A Menina do Mar (1958).
In 1999 she became the first woman to win the Camões Prize, the main award for literature in Portuguese, and in 2014 her remains were moved to the National Pantheon in Lisbon. Several selections of her poems exist in English.
Read Sophia if you want clear, elemental poetry about the sea, light and justice.
Start with The Perfect Hour (2015). A selection of her poems in English, translated by Colin Rorrison with Margaret Jull Costa. Or Log Book: Selected Poems (1997). An earlier English selection, translated by Richard Zenith.
Maria Judite de Carvalho
1921–1998 · Lisbon, Portugal
Maria Judite de Carvalho wrote spare novellas and stories about loneliness, mostly the loneliness of women in Lisbon under the Salazar dictatorship. Her short fiction includes Tanta Gente, Mariana and the prize-winning collection Seta Despedida (1995), and she also wrote newspaper chronicles.
Her prizes include the Prémio Camilo Castelo Branco and the Grande Prémio de Conto Camilo Castelo Branco. The 2021 English translation of Empty Wardrobes by Margaret Jull Costa brought her work to English-language readers as a precise observer of domestic life.
Read Carvalho if you like short, exact fiction about women’s lives under constraint.
Start with Empty Wardrobes (1966). Os Armários Vazios: a Lisbon widow’s idealised memory of her husband is overturned by a revelation at her daughter’s seventeenth birthday, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Two Lines Press, 2021).
José Saramago
1922–2010 · Azinhaga, Portugal
Saramago wrote long-sentenced, sparsely punctuated novels that take one impossible premise and follow it through: a whole city going blind, death ceasing to work, Christ’s life retold. Baltasar and Blimunda (1982), The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984) and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991) made his name; Blindness (1995) became his most widely read book.
He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. After the Portuguese government blocked The Gospel According to Jesus Christ from a European prize shortlist, he moved to Lanzarote, where he lived until his death in 2010.
Read Saramago if you like novels of ideas that turn a single strange premise into a moral test.
Start with Blindness (1995). Ensaio sobre a Cegueira: an epidemic of blindness sweeps an unnamed city and a doctor’s wife, the only one who can still see, guides a small group through the collapse, translated by Giovanni Pontiero (1997). Or The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984). A novel built around Ricardo Reis, one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, returning to Lisbon in the 1930s.
António Lobo Antunes
1942–2026 · Lisbon, Portugal
Lobo Antunes trained as a doctor and psychiatrist and served as an army doctor in Angola in the early 1970s, during Portugal’s colonial war. That war, and the decay of the Portuguese family and state, run through his dense, many-voiced novels, from Os Cus de Judas (1979) to Fado Alexandrino (1983) and The Inquisitors’ Manual (1996).
He won the Jerusalem Prize in 2005 and the Camões Prize in 2007, and died in Lisbon in March 2026. His books are demanding, built from overlapping monologues, and are best approached through his early, shorter war novel.
Read Lobo Antunes if you want to read the Portuguese colonial war from the inside, and do not mind demanding prose.
Start with The Land at the End of the World (1979). Os Cus de Judas: an army psychiatrist looks back on his posting to wartime Angola, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (W.W. Norton, 2011); an earlier translation by Elizabeth Lowe appeared as South of Nowhere (1983). Or The Inquisitors’ Manual (1996). O Manual dos Inquisidores, translated by Richard Zenith.
Lídia Jorge
Born 1946 · Boliqueime, Algarve, Portugal
Lídia Jorge writes novels about Portugal after the 1974 Carnation Revolution: the end of empire, the return of colonists, migration and the changing Algarve where she was born. Her debut O Dia dos Prodígios (1980) was followed by A Costa dos Murmúrios (1988; The Murmuring Coast), The Painter of Birds (1998) and Misericórdia (2022).
She won the FIL Prize for Literature in Romance Languages, awarded in Guadalajara, in 2020, and the Camões Prize in 2026. The Murmuring Coast, The Painter of Birds and The Wind Whistling in the Cranes are available in English, and suit readers interested in the social history of modern Portugal.
Read Jorge if you want to see how Portugal lived with the end of its empire.
Start with The Wind Whistling in the Cranes (2002). O Vento Assobiando nas Gruas: in the Algarve, a woman investigating her grandmother’s death at a disused cannery falls for a man from the Cape Verdean family living there, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Annie McDermott (Liveright). Or The Painter of Birds (1998). O Vale da Paixão, one of the novels by her available in English.
Dulce Maria Cardoso
Born 1964 · Carrazeda de Ansiães, Portugal
Dulce Maria Cardoso was born in Trás-os-Montes and grew up in Luanda, Angola, until her family returned to Portugal in 1975 with about half a million other retornados. That uprooting is the subject of O Retorno (2011). Her other novels include Os Meus Sentimentos (2005), which won the EU Prize for Literature, and Eliete (2018).
Her fiction stays close to the voices of its characters and is a good way into what decolonisation meant to ordinary Portuguese families. The Return appeared in English in 2016, and the English edition of Eliete was longlisted for the 2025 International Dublin Literary Award.
Read Cardoso if you like coming-of-age novels set against a historical rupture.
Start with The Return (2011). O Retorno: in 1975 a fifteen-year-old boy leaves Luanda for Portugal with his mother and sister and is housed in a seaside hotel near Lisbon while his father’s fate is unknown, translated by Ángel Gurría-Quintana (2016). Or Eliete (2018). A novel subtitled ‘a normal life’; the English edition was longlisted for the 2025 International Dublin Literary Award.
Gonçalo M. Tavares
Born 1970 · Luanda, Angola
Gonçalo M. Tavares writes short, cold, precise novels about power, violence and reason. His novels include Klaus Klump: A Man (2003), Joseph Walser’s Machine (2004), Jerusalem (2004) and Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique (2007); a separate series of short ‘Mr.’ books, such as Mr Valéry and Logic, forms the fictional neighbourhood of his work.
Born in Luanda, he won the José Saramago Prize in 2005 for Jerusalém and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France in 2010. Saramago predicted that he would one day win the Nobel Prize.
Read Tavares if you like spare, unsettling fiction in the line of Kafka and Musil.
Start with Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique (2007). Aprender a Rezar na Era da Técnica: a calculating surgeon rises through his country’s ruling party until an illness undoes him, translated by Daniel Hahn (Dalkey Archive, 2011). Or Jerusalem (2004). The José Saramago Prize-winning novel, translated by Anna Kushner (Dalkey Archive, 2009).
Afonso Cruz
Born 1971 · Figueira da Foz, Portugal
Afonso Cruz is a novelist, illustrator, animated-film director and musician, a member of the band The Soaked Lamb. He has published more than thirty books across novels, plays, picture books, poetry and essays, and his work has appeared in more than twenty languages.
His novel A Boneca de Kokoschka won the EU Prize for Literature in 2012. It is playful and layered, with a novel inside the novel, and suits readers who enjoy literary games built on real history.
Read Cruz if you like inventive, puzzle-like novels with stories nested inside stories.
Start with Kokoschka’s Doll (2010). A Boneca de Kokoschka: in wartime Dresden a bird-shop owner hears the voice of a Jewish boy hiding beneath his floor, the start of a chain of linked lives that takes in Oskar Kokoschka’s doll of Alma Mahler, translated by Rahul Bery (MacLehose Press).
José Luís Peixoto
Born 1974 · Galveias, Alentejo, Portugal
José Luís Peixoto writes lyrical, often dark novels about rural Alentejo, family and grief. His books include Morreste-me (2000), translated as You Died on Me; Nenhum Olhar won the José Saramago Prize in 2001, when he was 27, the youngest winner. Galveias, named after his home village, won the Oceanos Prize in 2016.
His novels move between voices and time periods, so they reward patient reading. The Piano Cemetery was his second novel to appear in English, after Nenhum Olhar, which was published in the UK as Blank Gaze and in the US as The Implacable Order of Things.
Read Peixoto if you like poetic, sorrowful family novels with shifting narrators.
Start with The Piano Cemetery (2006). Cemitério de Pianos: a dead father and his marathon-running son narrate the story of a Lisbon family of piano repairers, translated by Daniel Hahn (Bloomsbury, 2010). Or Blank Gaze. Nenhum Olhar, the novel that won him the José Saramago Prize in 2001.
Which Portuguese author should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For a classic novel — Eça de Queirós, The Maias (1888)
- For poetry and the inner life — Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (1982)
- For a Nobel Prize winner — José Saramago, Blindness (1995)
- For a short book — Maria Judite de Carvalho, Empty Wardrobes (1966)
- For the colonial war and its aftermath — Dulce Maria Cardoso, The Return (2011)
- For contemporary literary fiction — Gonçalo M. Tavares, Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique (2007)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
Who is the most famous Portuguese author?
Luís de Camões, author of the epic The Lusiads, is Portugal’s national poet. In the twentieth century Fernando Pessoa and José Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, are the best known abroad.
What is the best Portuguese book to start with?
Blindness by José Saramago is the most widely read Portuguese novel in English. For something shorter, Maria Judite de Carvalho’s Empty Wardrobes is a compact novella set in 1960s Lisbon.
Has a Portuguese writer won the Nobel Prize?
Yes. José Saramago won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998.
What is the Camões Prize?
It is the main literary award for writers in Portuguese. Writers on this list who have won it include Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1999), António Lobo Antunes (2007) and Lídia Jorge (2026).
Which Portuguese books deal with the colonial wars and decolonisation?
António Lobo Antunes’s The Land at the End of the World draws on his service as an army doctor in Angola, and Dulce Maria Cardoso’s The Return follows a family of retornados arriving from Luanda in 1975.
Who translates Portuguese literature into English?
Margaret Jull Costa has translated Eça de Queirós, Fernando Pessoa, Maria Judite de Carvalho, António Lobo Antunes and Lídia Jorge. Other translators named on this list include Richard Zenith, Giovanni Pontiero, Daniel Hahn, Landeg White and Rahul Bery.
Start with the author whose questions interest you most. The book you remember longest may not be the one with the clearest answers, but the one that changes how you see something familiar.
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