Jorge Luis Borges

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Jorge Luis Borges died in Geneva, Switzerland on June 14th 1986. Author of " The Aleph".
Eight of Borges's poems appear in the 1943 anthology of Spanish American Poets by H.R. Hays. "The Garden of Forking Paths", one of the first Borges stories to be translated into English, appeared in the August 1948 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, translated by Anthony Boucher. Though several other Borges translations appeared in literary magazines and anthologies during the 1950s (and one story appeared in the science fiction magazine Fantastic Universe in 1960), his international fame dates from the early 1960s.

In 1961, Borges received the first Prix International, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. While Beckett had garnered a distinguished reputation in Europe and America, Borges had been largely unknown and untranslated in the English-speaking world and the prize stirred great interest in his work. The Italian government named Borges Commendatore and the University of Texas at Austin appointed him for one year to the Tinker Chair. This led to his first lecture tour in the United States. In 1962, two major anthologies of Borges's writings were published in English by New York presses: Ficciones and Labyrinths. In that year, Borges began lecture tours of Europe. Numerous honors were to accumulate over the years such as a Special Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America "for distinguished contribution to the mystery genre" (1976), the Balzan Prize (for Philology, Linguistics and literary Criticism) and the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, the Cervantes Prize (all 1980), as well as the French Legion of Honour (1983) and the Diamond Konex Award for Literature Arts as the most important writer in the last decade in his country.

In 1967, Borges began a five-year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni, through whom he became better known in the English-speaking world. He continued to publish books, among them El libro de los seres imaginarios (Book of Imaginary Beings, 1967, co-written with Margarita Guerrero), El informe de Brodie (Dr. Brodie's Report, 1970), and El libro de arena (The Book of Sand, 1975). He lectured prolifically. Many of these lectures were anthologized in volumes such as Siete noches (Seven Nights) and Nueve ensayos dantescos (Nine Dantesque Essays).

His presence, also in 1967, on campus at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA) influenced a group of students among whom was Jared Loewenstein, who would later become founder and curator of the Jorge Luis Borges Collection at UVA, one of the largest repositories of documents and manuscripts pertaining to the early works of JLB. In 1984, he travelled to Athens, Greece and later to Rethymnon, Crete where he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the School of Philosophy at University of Crete.

Source: Wikipedia