JOSÉ SARAMAGO (1922–2010) was the author of many novels, among them Blindness, All the Names, Baltasar and Blimunda, and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
MARGARET JULL COSTA has won numerous prizes for her work, including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize, and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.