Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, has died at the age of 87, his publisher has announced.

Saramago, a communist and atheist, only began to become recognised for his work in his fifties.

Saramago moved to Lanzarote in the early 1990s after opposition from Portugal's right-wing government to his controversial work The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

The administration barred his work from being entered in the European Literary Prize on the grounds that it was offensive to Catholics....