Last volume of Lanzarote Diaries to be published eight years after writer’s death

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

A previously unknown volume of a journal by the Portuguese author José Saramago will finally come to light after being retrieved from his computer – eight years after his death and 20 years after he wrote it.

The work, written in 1998 when he won the Nobel prize for literature, is the sixth and last volume of Cuadernos de Lanzarote (Lanzarote Diaries) and will be published in October in Portugal and Spain, his widow, Pilar del Río, said Tuesday.

Saramago was living on the Canary island of Lanzarote when he died in 2010, aged 87, and the work was found buried in a file on his computer, said Del Río, president of the José Saramago Foundation in Lisbon.

“I thought everything had been published. I was very perplexed when I realised nobody had got wind of this book’s existence,” she said.

Saramago had in fact cryptically referred to the volume in 2001.

“I wouldn’t like it, just in the year something really noteworthy has happened to me (his Nobel award), if someone came along and told me I hadn’t done it,” he joked in allusion to a follow-up during the presentation of the fifth volume of the journal.

Saramago is known for such novels as The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Blindness.