MADRID Nobel literature prize winner Jose Saramago, who left his native Portugal in a dispute with his country's government, died on Friday on the Canary island of Lanzarote aged 87, his foundation said.

The author known for his atheist, communist views suffered multiple organ failures after a long illness and was “surrounded by his family” when he died in a “serene and peaceful way,” the Jose Saramago Foundation said in a statement.

Saramago, whose novels include “Blindness” about a country whose population loses its sight, had spent several recent periods in hospital with respiratory problems and was suffering from leukaemia, the daily El Mundo said.

His visionary and often surreal novels only found fame when he was in his 60s and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998.

Saramago left Portugal in the early 1990s after the conservative government in power refused to allow his controversial novel “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” to compete for a European literary prize.

He lived on Lanzarote with his wife Pilar del Rio, a Spanish journalist.

Born to a peasant family in the central village of Azinhaga, Saramago left school at the age of 12 and trained as a locksmith.

Saramago published his first novel in 1947, but his next work, a collection of poems, did not appear until 19 years later.

A member of the Communist Party, which was banned at the time, he took part in the revolution that ousted the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974 and published a second novel in 1977.

His literary career only took off with the publication in 1982, when he was 60, of “Baltasar and Blimunda”, a historical love story set in 17th-century Portugal.

His 1995 novel “Blindness” depicts the breakdown of society after nearly everyone in an unnamed country goes blind. It was made into a Hollywood movie in 2008 starring Julianne Moore. —AFP