Marcelo pays homage to Lobo Antunes with a large necklace from the Order of Camões. Government approves a day of national mourning

The President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, has already reacted to the death of António Lobo Antunes, considering that “few have represented the literary greatness of a territorially small country so well”.

The Head of State begins by recalling the book Memória de Elefante, from 1979, as “one of the most significant books of Portuguese culture in freedom”. “The style of this debut work, and of the following ones, dense but colloquial, memorialistic, provocative, poetic and political, marked a new tone in the Portuguese novel, a genre that would have notable critical and editorial success in the 1980s, and unprecedented repercussion abroad”, he says in a note published on the Presidency’s website.

“António Lobo Antunes wrote all his work as a novelist, but also as a chronicler, in a record of blunt tenderness, with the heartache and failure of ordinary lives placed alongside political tragedies, excess and empathy. Heir to Céline, Faulkner, Cardoso Pires, Lobo Antunes left a vast, visceral, sophisticated bibliography in narrative terms, attentive to everyday life, and very rich in experiences such as war and the clinical practice of psychiatry”, notes Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.

“No one was more imitated by subsequent generations than Lobo Antunes, few were so read, translated, awarded and studied. This without ever seeking any unanimity, being known for strong opinionswhich the practice of chronicling converted in a certain way into an understanding of the melancholy and fury of living”, he adds, saying that as “his reader, admirer and friend for decades”, he awarded him the insignia of the Grand Cross of the Order of Camões in 2022, “with the certainty that few have represented so well the literary greatness of a territorially small country”.

“I will now deposit with him the Grand Collar of the same Order, the ultimate symbol of Portuguese literature”, he announces. This distinction, which rewards exceptional contributions to literature and dialogue between cultures, is the highest cultural distinction of the Portuguese State.

“To his wife, daughters and other family members, I express my condolence and the grateful tribute of everyone who lived with the books and through the books of Antonio Lobo Antunes”, concludes the president.