Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges (Buenos Aires, 1899 – Geneva, 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, poet, essayist and translator. He wrote in Spanish, yet he is read as a central figure of world literature, and his influence reaches both the fantastic story and the philosophical reflection on fiction.

He was born in Palermo, then a poor district of Buenos Aires, into an educated middle-class family. His father, a lawyer with a passion for books, gave him early access to a large library in English. Borges grew up bilingual, learned to read before the age of five and, at about ten, translated Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince. In 1914 the family moved to Geneva, partly to escape the upheaval of the First World War and partly so that his father could seek eye treatment. There Borges learned French, attended the Collège de Genève and read Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Chesterton. Between 1919 and 1921 the family lived in Spain, where he joined the Ultraist movement and published his first poems in magazines.

Back in Buenos Aires, he published poetry and essays in avant-garde journals such as Martín Fierro, and helped found magazines such as Prisma and Proa. Over time he moved away from the exalted lyricism of his early books and turned to the short story, to essays built on invented erudition, and to fiction that plays with labyrinths, mirrors, libraries and invented authors. He worked as a librarian, and in 1955 he was appointed director of the National Library and professor of English literature at the University of Buenos Aires. By the age of fifty-five he was almost completely blind, a progressive condition that, many critics have argued, pushed him to imagine his symbols in new ways and to favour poetry and the short story over the novel.

His work reached a wider audience from the 1960s, when his books began to appear in translation in the United States and Europe. In 1961 he shared the first Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett, and in 1971 he received the Jerusalem Prize. His international fame coincided with the rise of the Latin American novel, although his own relationship to that movement was distant. He is widely regarded as one of the writers who most renewed the language of fiction in Spanish, and his mark can be seen in generations of Latin American narrators and in contemporary discussions of metafiction. His conservative political stances were controversial, and debate continues over whether they played a part in his never receiving the Nobel Prize, for which he was a candidate for decades. He died in Geneva in 1986, the city to which he dedicated his final book, The Conspirators.