Maputo — Jose Craveirinha, generally regarded as Mozambique's greatest poet, died at the age of 80 on Thursday morning in a South African clinic.

He had been seriously ill for some time, but his family had believed his condition was beginning to improve.

Craveirinha was born in Maputo on 28 May 1922. He made a name for himself as a journalist, working first on the proto- nationalist paper "O Brado Africano". It was through this paper that he came to know other anti-colonial poets such as Rui de Noronha, Noemia de Sousa, and Marcelino dos Santos.

Craveirinha later worked on the daily papers "Noticias" and "A Tribuna", and contributed articles to several other publications in Lourenco Marques, as Maputo was then known. Many of his early poems were first published in these newspapers. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he won literary prizes in Lourenco Marques, Beira and Lisbon.

He was active in the Lourenco Marques African Association in the 1950s, and became its chairperson. This activity was tolerated by the colonial regime - but Craveirinha was also involved in clandestine politics, and joined the newly-formed liberation movement, FRELIMO.

Craveirinha's first collection of poetry, "Chigubo", was published in 1964. But the following year he was arrested by the Portuguese political police, the PIDE, in 1965, as a member of a branch of the FRELIMO Fourth Politico-Military Region, and was jailed until 1969.

Since Mozambican independence in 1975, Craveirinha has been widely recognised as one of the greatest contemporary poets in the Portuguese language, and was awarded the prestigious Camoes Prize in 1991. This prize, named after Luis de Camoes, author of the Portuguese national epic "Os Lusiadas", had only been awarded on two previous occasions, to the Portuguese writer Miguel Torga, and to the Brazilian Joao Cabral de Melo Neto.