Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges 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 and El Aleph, published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity and mirrors, and have had a major influence on the magical realist movement in twentieth-century Latin American literature. Completely blind by the age of fifty-five, he served as director of Argentina's National Public Library and professor of English literature at the University of Buenos Aires, and in 1961 he shared the first International Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett, consolidating an international reputation that grew through the 1960s.