A sculpture of a golden hand in one of the busiest districts in Lisbon is a memorial meant to invoke Borges’s Portuguese origins - about which he wrote a poem, ’Los Borges’. Borges possessed extensive knowledge of Portuguese culture and was willing to use that knowledge to locate himself as part of European universalizing traditions. His knowledge ranged over Luis de Camões, Antero de Quental, Eça de Queiros, et al. He wrote a sonnet, ’A Camões’ and an essay on his work. Elsewhere, he claimed that his Portuguese lineage enabled him to grasp Pessoa’s writing more thoroughly. Saramago drew inspiration from Borges and imbued the Argentine writer’s tropes with a progressive slant. Borges’s influence also extends to the visual arts of Portugal and is present in a recent (2017) work of Portuguese fiction.

In an interview given to Portuguese journalist Anabela Mota Ribeiro in 1999, Mia Couto claimed the only word he deemed to be sacred and therefore immune to his hallmark linguistic iconoclasm is ‘mulher’, the Portuguese for ‘woman’ (Mota Ribeiro 1999, 15). For years, the acclaim the Mozambican writer received focused on his lexical playfulness. Scholars like Mary Lou Daniel (1995), Fernanda Cavacas (1999), and Fernanda and Matteo Angius (1998) framed the critical reception to Couto's work in terms that highlighted the author's penchant for distorting standard Portuguese syntax and lyrically generating portmanteau words, neologisms, and innovative turns of phrase, which, besides testing the impressive translation talents of the David Brookshaws of this world, were deemed to add something to a general heritage of the Portuguese language. The fact that the word ‘mulher’ was forever exempt from Couto's challenges to any flawed notion of Portuguese linguistic stasis, even before he consciously took the decision to reduce the preponderance and prominence of his language games, draws attention to a special status bestowed on the concept of woman in his work.

Couto's portrayal of women has invariably been sympathetic. From a mysteriously seductive femininity in short stories like ‘Woman of Me’, in the collection Every Man Is a Race (1994), to an exploited daughter in ‘The Girl with a Twisted Future’, in Voices Made Night (1990), Couto has subtly critiqued the patriarchal dichotomy that restricts female agency in contemporary society, both within and beyond Mozambique. His insistence on corrupting demarcations has led to multiple examples of gender ambiguity in his texts, a trope that undermines patriarchy's clear delimitation of boundaries. More recently, however, Couto's critique of the mechanisms of patriarchy, as they operate in Mozambique, has become far more explicit. His 2009 novel, Jesusalém, translated into English by David Brookshaw under the title The Tuner of Silences (2012), is one of his most powerful and damning portrayals to date of the abuses suffered by women, and the damage done to men by a social structure based on gender inequality.

The Tuner of Silences draws on a range of tropes Couto used in his earlier work. There is fluidity in any and all frontiers. Lies have a structuring role in manufacturing and revealing truths. Writing as an aesthetic process is deemed to allow for the imagination of other realities.

The climate of fear the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar fostered at various times during its long reign and its subtle and not-so-subtle censorship techniques had a profound impact on the cultural production of Portugal. Mediocre writers and playwrights were celebrated by the regime, through prizes and official approval. Yet, unlike under other authoritarian regimes, a significant amount of work that critiqued the premises and effects of Salazarism emerged within Portugal. The regime tended to use intimidation more than outright censorship, although some writers, such as José Cardoso Pires, did fall foul of the censor's blue pencil. However, Salazar preferred publishers and writers to police themselves, occasionally making examples of those who did not. This meant that much of the critique of and literary resistance to the regime was veiled, depending on metaphor and analogy.

The early years of Salazar's government saw the prominence of António Ferro (1895–1956) as the head of the state's propaganda machine. Ferro was himself a mediocre playwright and writer, who had been involved in the Modernist movement in Portugal. Through his friendship with the writer Mário de Sá-Carneiro (1890–1916), he had acquired, in 1915, the editorship of Orpheu, one of the movement's main publication venues. Ironically, given his future role in managing the Salazar regime's message through methods including censorship, his first play, Mar Alto (1923; High Sea), a rather dreary, one-dimensional depiction of an adulterous affair, was banned in 1923 when it was performed in Lisbon, on the grounds of public decency. The previous year, the play had been staged in Brazil as part of the aftermath of São Paulo's Semana da Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week).

Ferro rose to political prominence in Portugal writing positive narratives of dictatorships around Europe, including those of Mussolini and Mustapha Kemel. His Viagem à Volta das Ditaduras (1927; Journey Around the Dictatorships) was published the year after the coup that ended the First Republic, aligning him with an ideology that favoured culture's deployment in the cause of a national dictatorship. In 1932, he published a series of interviews with Salazar, and was soon thereafter put in charge of the National Propaganda Secretariat.