Portugal Nobel laureate Saramago in Ottawa This Weekend

LISBON (AFP) - Portuguese author Jose Saramago, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, will launch his next novel simultaneously in six nations in Europe and Latin America in October, his publisher said.

The 82-year-old author's latest work, "The Intermittency of Death", will be released first in Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Portugal, Portuguese publisher Caminho said.
Saramago, whose novels include "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis" and "The Cave", has said his new book will have a different style from all those which he has written so far but has refused to give more details.
His last novel, "Lucidity" released in March 2004, tells the tale of a right-wing government's violent reaction to an election in which more than 80 percent of votes cast are blank.
Saramago is the first, and so far only, Portuguese-language author to receive the world's most prized literary award.
He has sold more than 3.5 million copies of his slightly surreal books, which have been published in more than 30 languages.
Born to poor parents in a farming town outside Lisbon in 1922, Saramago was raised in the Portuguese capital where he worked mainly as a journalist until a bloodless coup in 1974 put an end to a repressive right-wing dictatorship which had ruled Portugal for nearly five decades.
His literary career did not take off until the publication in 1982, when Saramago was 60, of "Baltasar and Blimunda", a historical love story set in 17th-century Portugal.