António Lobo Antunes, who has been called “one of Portugal’s pre-eminent writers” by The New York Times, was born in Lisbon in 1942, where he still resides. The son of a physician, he too became a doctor and then spent four years in the Portuguese army during the Angolan war. His fictional “memoir” of that war, South of Nowhere, was internationally praised and followed by other widely translated and much-honored novels, including Act of the Damned, Fado Alexandrino, Explanation of the Birds, and The Natural Order of Things.
Photo credit: The Paris Review