The late Portuguese writer Jose Saramago's journal was retrieved from his computer.
Eight years after the death of the Nobel laureate and 20 years after he penned the work, his previously unknown volume of a journal will finally come to light after being retrieved from his computer, AFP reported.
The work, written in 1998 when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, is the sixth and last volume of "Cuadernos de Lanzarote" (Lanzarote Diaries) and will be published in October in Portugal and Spain, his widow Pilar del Rio said.
Saramago was living on the Canary island of Lanzarote when he died in 2010, aged 87, and the work was found buried in a file on his computer, said Del Rio, who heads the Jose Saramago Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal.
"I thought everything had been published. I was very perplexed when I realized nobody had got wind of this book's existence," she said.
Saramago is known for such novels as "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" and "Blindness."
He was born into a peasant family in central Portugal and brought up in Lisbon. After publishing several volumes of poetry in the 1960s and early 70s, he turned to writing novels. In the 1980s Saramago published four major novels which brought him international recognition. He was the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In October 1998, after several years on the unofficial short list, Saramago received the Nobel Prize for he was regarded the one "who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality," according to Nobelprize.org.
More than two million copies of Saramago's books have been sold in Portugal alone and his work has been translated into 25 languages.
In his works, Saramago addresses serious matters with empathy for the human condition and for the isolation of contemporary urban life. His characters struggle with their need to connect with one another, form relations and bond as a community.
He founded the José Saramago Foundation in 2007, with the aim to defend and spread the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the promotion of culture in Portugal just like in all the countries, and protection of the environment.
