António Lobo Antunes, who has been called “one of Portugal’s preeminent writers” by The New York Times, was born in Lisbon in 1942. The son of a physician, he too became a doctor and then spent four years in the Portuguese Army during the Angolan War. His book on that war, South of Nowhere (Random House, 1983, trans. Elizabeth Lowe), was internationally praised and followed by other widely translated and much-honored novels, including An Explanation of the Birds (Grove, 1995, trans. Richard Zenith), Act of the Damned (Grove, 1996, trans. Richard Zenith), and The Natural Order of Things (Grove, 2001, trans Richard Zenith).
Nonfiction
Summer 2025
Only the Dead Have Been to Mafra
To this day passing by Mafra upsets me, though Mafra itself is blameless, Mafra and that entire surrounding area, where I wandered as a cadet during those few doomed months […]