From its earliest documents, dating from the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Portuguese literature has been part of European cultural movements, with original contributions of international standing. Its great strength is lyric poetry, born with the medieval cancioneiros and including names such as Camões and Pessoa, but the twentieth century also saw a great age of the novel, crowned by the Nobel Prize for José Saramago.
The Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Medieval poetry in Galician-Portuguese is collected in the cancioneiros: the cantigas de amigo, in which a girl sings of her absent lover, the Provençal-inspired cantigas de amor and the satirical cantigas de escárnio e maldizer. Among the poets was King Dinis himself. A tradition of excellence in historical writing also emerged early, beginning with the Chronicles of Fernão Lopes (fifteenth century), lively and attentive to the role of ordinary people.
In the sixteenth century drama found its great author in Gil Vicente, whose farces and autos portray every social class with irony. It was the century of Luís de Camões (c. 1524-1580), soldier and poet, author of superb sonnets and above all of Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads, 1572), the epic poem celebrating Vasco da Gama's voyage and the history of Portugal: the day of his death, 10 June, is the national holiday. In this period, and especially during the union with Spain (1580-1640), many authors also wrote in Castilian, but Portuguese literature kept its own voice. In the seventeenth century the Jesuit António Vieira stands out, a great preacher and defender of Brazil's indigenous peoples.
From the eighteenth to the nineteenth century
The eighteenth century's best-known poet is Bocage, born in Setúbal, author of satirical and lyrical sonnets. In the nineteenth century Romanticism arrived with Almeida Garrett, poet, playwright and author of Travels in My Homeland, and the historian and novelist Alexandre Herculano. Camilo Castelo Branco wrote passionate novels such as Doomed Love. The "Generation of 1870" renewed the country's culture: it included the poet Antero de Quental and above all Eça de Queirós, the great realist novelist, author of Cousin Bazilio, The Crime of Father Amaro and The Maias, an ironic portrait of Lisbon society. At the end of the century Cesário Verde brought the modern city into poetry.
The twentieth century
The twentieth century opened with the Renascença Portuguesa movement and Teixeira de Pascoaes's saudosismo, linked to saudade, and with the modernism of the magazine Orpheu (1915), driven by Mário de Sá-Carneiro and Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). Pessoa, now regarded as one of the century's greatest poets, also wrote through several heteronyms, imaginary authors with their own biographies and styles: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos and Bernardo Soares, to whom The Book of Disquiet is attributed. Alongside him stand the poet Florbela Espanca and, later, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, a clear voice of the sea and freedom, and Eugénio de Andrade. Under the dictatorship many authors, such as Miguel Torga and the neo-realists, wrote under censorship.
After 1974 the novel flourished. José Saramago (1922-2010), author of Baltasar and Blimunda, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis and Blindness, became in 1998 the first Portuguese-language author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Other great novelists include António Lobo Antunes, who writes about the colonial war and Portuguese society, and Agustina Bessa-Luís. Contemporary authors available in translation include Gonçalo M. Tavares, valter hugo mãe, José Luís Peixoto and Lídia Jorge.
For the traveller
In Lisbon you can follow in Pessoa's footsteps, from his statue outside the café A Brasileira in the Chiado to the Casa Fernando Pessoa, where he spent his last years; the José Saramago Foundation is in the Casa dos Bicos, near the Alfama. Pessoa now rests in the Jerónimos monastery, near Camões's symbolic tomb. Historic bookshops such as Bertrand in the Chiado, considered the oldest bookshop in the world still operating, and Lello in Porto are must-sees for book lovers. On the language, see also the page on the history of the Portuguese language.