The son of rural labourers, Saramago grew up in great poverty in Lisbon. After holding a series of jobs as mechanic and metalworker, Saramago began working in a Lisbon publishing firm and eventually became a journalist and translator. He joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969, published several volumes of poems, and served as editor of a Lisbon newspaper in 1974–75 during the cultural thaw that followed the overthrow of the dictatorship of António Salazar (Salazar, António de Oliveira). An anti-Communist backlash followed in which Saramago lost his position, and in his 50s he began writing the novels that would eventually establish his international reputation.

One of Saramago's most important novels is Memorial do convento (1982; “Memoirs of the Convent”; Eng. trans. Baltasar and Blimunda). With 18th-century Portugal (during the inquisition) as a backdrop, it chronicles the efforts of a handicapped war veteran and his lover to flee their situation using a flying machine powered by human will. Saramago alternates this allegorical fantasy with grimly realistic descriptions of the construction of the Mafra Convent by thousands of labourers pressed into service by King John V. (John V) Another ambitious novel, O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis (1984; The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis), juxtaposes the romantic involvements of its narrator, a poet-physician who returns to Portugal at the start of the Salazar dictatorship, with long dialogues that examine human nature as revealed in Portuguese history and culture. The novel A jangada de pedra (1986; The Stone Raft), explores the situation that ensues when the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from Europe and becomes an island, and O evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo (1991; The Gospel According to Jesus Christ) posits Christ as an innocent caught in the machinations of God and Satan. In both novels Saramago continues his practice of setting whimsical parables against realistic historical backgrounds in order to comment ironically on human foibles.

Among Saramago's other novels are his first, Manual de pintura e caligrafia (1976; Manual of Painting and Calligraphy), and such later works as Historia do cerco de Lisboa (1989; The History of the Siege of Lisbon), Ensaio sobre a cegueira (1995; “Essay on Blindness”; Eng. trans. Blindness), Todos os nomes (1997; “All the Names”), and O homem duplicado (2002; The Double). When he received the Nobel Prize in 1998, his novels were widely read in Europe but less well known in the United States. He was the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize. Saramago also wrote poetry, plays, and several volumes of essays and short stories, as well as autobiographical works.