One of the masters of contemporary fiction, António Lobo Antunes was born in 1942 in Lisbon. He served as a military doctor in Portugal’s doomed colonial war in Angola, an experience—combined with the political oppression of the Salazar dictatorship—that informs much of his fiction.

“If you worry, you die. If you don’t worry, you die. So, why worry?”

Returning to Lisbon in 1973, Lobo Antunes worked as a clinical psychiatrist—“a man who knows the scent and taste of dust”—before devoting himself primarily to literature.

“Deep down, of course, it’s our own death that we fear when we imagine someone else’s—and that is what makes cowards of us all.”

For George Steiner, Lobo Antunes is the heir to Conrad or Faulkner—though Céline seems more precise.

His novels include: The Land at the End of the World, Knowledge of Hell, An Explanation of Birds, Acts of the Damned, The Natural Order of Things, The Inquisitors’ Manual, and What Can I Do When Everything’s On Fire?

“I never read my books—I simply write them.”

António Lobo Antunes lives in Lisbon.