Monteiro (La testa perduta di Damasceno Monteiro) based on the true story of a man whose headless corpse was found in a park. It was discovered that the man had been murdered in a police station of the Republican National Guard (GNR). The news story struck the writer's sensitivity and imagination. The event's setting in Porto also gave the author the opportunity to show his love for the city. In order to finish this novel, Tabucchi worked on the documents gathered by the investigators at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg who enforce civil rights and the conditions of detention in Europe, including the relationship between citizens and police. The novel proved prophetic when police Sergeant José dos Santos later confessed the murder, was convicted and sentenced to 17 years' imprisonment. Also in 1997, Tabucchi wrote Marconi, se ben mi ricordo, followed the next year by L'Automobile, la Nostalgie et l'Infini (1998). That year the Leibniz Academy awarded him the Prize Nossack. He wrote Gli Zingari e il Rinascimento and Ena poukamiso gemato likedes (Una camicia piena di macchie. Conversazioni di A.T. con Anteos Chrysostomidis) in 1999. In 2001 Tabucchi published the epistolary novel, Si sta facendo sempre più tardi (English translation, 2006: It's Getting Later All the Time). In it, 17 letters which celebrate the triumph of the word, which like "messages in the bottle", have no addressee, they are missives the author addressed to an "unknown poste restante". The book received the 2002 Prize France Culture (the French cultural radio) for foreign literature. He used to spend six months of the year in Lisbon, with his wife, a native of the city, and their two children. The rest of the year he spent in Tuscany, where he taught Portuguese literature at the University of Siena. Tabucchi considered himself a writer only in an ontological sense, because from the existential point of view he was glad to define himself as a "university professor". For Tabucchi, literature was not a profession, "but something that involves desires, dreams and imagination". Tabucchi regularly contributed articles to the cultural pages of the newspapers Corriere della Sera and El País. Death Tabucchi died in a hospital in Lisbon on 25 March 2012, after a long battle with cancer. He was 68. Honors In 2007, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège. The Portuguese government named him Commander of the Order of