Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine writer, essayist, and translator born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and died in Geneva in 1986. The son of a lawyer-philosopher with English ancestry and an Argentine mother of Spanish and Portuguese stock, he grew up bilingual in Spanish and English in the suburb of Palermo, surrounded by his father's library, which he later said was the chief event of his life.

The family moved to Europe in 1914 and was stranded by the First World War in Geneva, where Borges learned French, German, and Latin. After several years in Spain, where he joined the Ultraist avant-garde, he returned to Buenos Aires in 1921 and began publishing essays and poems on the city's gauchos, suburbs, and metaphysical questions. His first short-fiction collections, Historia universal de la infamia (1935) and El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (1941), introduced the labyrinths, mirrors, encyclopedias, and infinite libraries that became his signature.

The collections Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (1949) established him as one of the foremost prose writers of the twentieth century, and his work helped trigger the Latin American Boom of the 1960s. From 1955 he served as director of the Argentine National Library at the same time he was going completely blind, a coincidence he recorded in his Poema de los dones.

Borges shared the 1961 Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett, lectured widely in Europe and the United States, and was repeatedly considered for the Nobel Prize, which he never received. He continued to dictate poems, parables, and essays until his death from liver cancer in Geneva.

The name Jorge is the Spanish and Portuguese form of George, from the Greek Georgios meaning farmer or earth-worker. Saint George the dragon-slayer carried the name across medieval Iberia, and it became a steady favorite in Argentina. He wore it as the surname of a writer who turned the library into a universe.