Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, has died at the age of 87, his publisher has announced.
Saramago, a communist and atheist, only began to become recognised for his work in his fifties.
One of his best-known novels is Blindness, written in 1995, which tells the story of a country whose entire population lose their sight.
He had been due to appear at Edinburgh's book festival in August.
Saramago moved to Lanzarote in the early 1990s after opposition from Portugal's right-wing government to his controversial work The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.
The administration barred his work from being entered in the European Literary Prize on the grounds that it was offensive to Catholics.
