Antunes, António Lobo

The Portuguese author António Antunes was born and raised in Benfica, a prosperous Lisbon suburb, as the oldest of six boys. His father was a doctor. Antunes decided he wanted to become an author when he was seven years old, but when he was sixteen, his father sent him to medical school in Lisbon. Antunes trained as a general practitioner and later specialised in psychiatry. Between 1971 and 1973 he served as an army doctor during the war in Angola. He wrote in his spare time and continued to do so until 1985 when he left his job at the Miguel Bombarda Hospital in Lisbon. Antunes has been married three times and has three daughters. In 2010, he married Cristina Ferreira de Almeida.