Born: 24 August 1899 · Died: 14 March 1986 · Age: 86
Argentine writer of labyrinthine short stories and essays in Ficciones and The Aleph, a giant of 20th-century literature
Did you know?He served as the director of Argentina's national library despite being almost completely blind by the age of fifty-five.
Quick facts
Date of birth24 August 1899
Date of death14 March 1986
Age at death86
Cause of deathPulmonary emphysema, liver cancer
NationalityArgentine
BirthplaceBuenos Aires, Argentina
Occupationtranslator, librarian, literary critic
Editor's Take:
Borges wrote short stories that read like puzzles, playing with infinity, mirrors, labyrinths and libraries. In The Library of Babel, he imagined a library containing every possible book, an idea that now feels like a prophecy of the internet. He mixed fact and fiction so cleverly that readers sometimes searched for books that never existed. He never wrote a novel, preferring compact, dense stories and essays. His influence on writers around the world, and on the idea of postmodern fiction, is enormous.
Key Milestones
1944: Publishes Ficciones
1949: Publishes The Aleph
1955: Becomes director of the National Library
1961: Shares the Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges ( BOR-hess; Spanish:; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph (transl.
