Manuel da Fonseca; Portuguese Writer and Poet

Manuel da Fonseca, 81, one of Portugal’s most prominent writers and poets. Da Fonseca produced stark poetry and novels about the rolling hills of his homeland. Portuguese film director Luis Rocha made his best-known novel, “Cerro Maior,” (“The Biggest Hill”), into a movie in the 1970s. The novel has been translated into several languages. Da Fonseca began his literary career in 1940 with the poem “Rosa dos Ventos” (“Rose of the Winds”). A college boxing champion, da Fonseca once said he was a “survivor of an indecent generation, from the . . . Spanish Civil War,” a period in history now long forgotten and recalled only by street names, he said. Portugal’s former Communist Party leader Alvaro Cunhal praised da Fonseca as “one of the greatest writers of the century, an extraordinary narrator of situations.” In Lisbon on Thursday of cancer.