Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges KBE (/ˈbɔrhɛs/; Spanish: [ˈxorxe ˈlwis ˈborxes]  audio (help·info)) (24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986), was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature. His work embraces the "character of unreality in all literature". His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and The Aleph (El Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and also to the fantasy genre. Critic Ángel Flores, the first to use the term magical realism to define a genre that reacted against the dominant realism and naturalism of the 19th century, considers the beginning of the movement to be the release of Borges's A Universal History of Infamy (Historia universal de la infamia). However, other critics consider Borges to be a predecessor and not actually a magical realist - if not a separate branch, the one of euro-argentinean writers, owing much more to the Ultraist movement which appered in Spain in the '20's. His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including stays in Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind at the age of 55; as he never learned braille, he became unable to read. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. In 1961 he came to international attention when he received the first Formentor prize (Prix International), which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971 he won the Jerusalem Prize. His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages, including English, his father tongue. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to Switzerland. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by his works being available in English, by the Latin American Boom and by the success of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists.". Other critics say that this is an overstatement, if not a wrong interpretation of a temporal coincidence; García Márquez owes much more to Hemingway - mainly in his early novels - than to Borges, and García Márquez narrative work has neither ultraist characteristics nor the philosophical depth of Borges works.