Saramago suffered from leukemia. He died on 18 June 2010, aged 87, having spent the last few years of his life in Lanzarote, Spain. His family said that he had breakfast and chatted with his wife and translator Pilar del Río on Friday morning, after which he started feeling unwell and died. "The Guardian" described him as "the finest Portuguese writer of his generation", while Fernanda Eberstadt of "The New York Times" said he was "known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction".