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(CNN) -- The Swedish Academy has again bestowed literature's most prestigious international prize on a European author and controversial social critic.

But while last year's selection of Italian playwright Dario Fo was perceived by many as a slight to more accomplished authors, few begrudge the winner of this year's prize, Portuguese novelist and poet José Saramago.

Saramago, who now lives in Spain's Canary Islands, is the first author writing in Portuguese to win the prize, worth approximately $950,000 this year.

"He is the grand old man of Portuguese letters and has been a contender for the Nobel for years," Guido Waldman, editorial director at Harvill, Saramago's British publisher, told The Guardian. "A lot of people were wondering why he had been bypassed."

He is the fourth European author to win the prize in as many years, preceded by Fo, Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska and Irish poet Seamus Heany.

Despite the near-universal acclaim that greeted the announcement, Saramago has his critics -- chief among them, the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1991 Saramago published "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ," a novel in which Jesus is depicted as a man who cohabits with Mary Magdelene and tries to evade crucifixion.

The novel created such a stir that, in 1992, Portuguese officials removed Saramago's name from a list of nominees for the European Literary Prize.

On the day the Nobel literature prize was announced, the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano objected to the choice, calling Saramago an "old-school" communist with a "substantially anti-religious vision."

The characteristically blunt Saramago received news of the award graciously, not only as an honor to his work but to fellow Portuguese authors.

"Through me, the eyes of the world will be drawn to authors writing in Portuguese in Brazil, Mozambique, Angola and many other countries," he told an adoring crowd at Frankfurt's book fair on October 8, the day the prize was announced.

"This prize is for all speakers of Portuguese, but while we're on the subject," he quipped, "I shall keep the money."

Saramago was honored for what the Swedish Academy, the body that awards the literature prize, called a "resonant style of fiction."

"With parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony, (Saramago) continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality," the academy noted in its citation.

It was high praise for the son of farm laborers who was a late literary bloomer.

Saramago, who left high school to become a mechanic, wrote his first novel at age 25. "The Land of Sin," his portrayal of Portugal's peasant culture, went unnoticed, and Saramago put down his author's pen for many years.

Though he became a journalist, the oppressive dictatorship of Portugal's António Salazar discouraged him from writing fiction.

In 1977, after the fall of the Salazar regime, Saramago's second novel, "Manual of Calligraphy and Painting," was published.

At age 54, he was on his way to becoming Portugal's most celebrated literary figure, with works translated into 25 languages.

Among these works are mythical stories through which Saramago, a communist and atheist, weaves his own brand of social and political commentary.

They include:

• "Baltasar and Blimunda," 1982, a fantasy about two lovers trying to escape the Inquisition in a flying machine. It was later turned into an opera performed at Milan's La Scala.
• "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis," 1984, a novel in which the protagonist converses with Portugal's beloved poet Fernando Pessoa.
• "The Stone Raft," 1986, a novel in which the Iberian peninsula breaks away from the European mainland. It is a critique of the place of poor countries among more powerful nations.
• "Blindness: A Novel," 1995, a tale of an inexplicable literal and figurative loss of sight among inhabitants of a modern city.

Saramago has won numerous awards, including the Camoes Prize in 1995, the highest literary award for an author in Portuguese, and the Independent Foreign Fiction Award in 1992 for "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis."

With his latest prize, Saramago joins the company of such literary greats as Rudyard Kipling, Anatole France, William Butler Yeats and Jean-Paul Sartre.