For Alberto Manguel, books are “another kind of lover”. A translator, editor, literary critic, essayist and novelist, he praises them in nearly all of his writing: books allow us to live, understand the world and find happiness. “True understanding of the world can only be conveyed by words.” Since his birth, Manguel has been immersed in a world of cosmopolitan words: born in Buenos Aires in 1948, he spent his childhood in Israel, where his father was the ambassador. He was raised by a Czech nanny who taught him English and German. Back in Argentina at the age of six, he learned Spanish, his “mother tongue”. At sixteen, he met Jorge Luis Borges who, having gone blind, hired him as a reader. This encounter was to have a determining influence. In 1968, he left Argentina, not long before the repressions of the military dictatorship. He travelled the world and lived in turn in France, Great Britain, Italy, Tahiti and Canada, becoming a citizen of the latter. He has lived in France since 2001.

A prolific author, he has published many anthologies and essays, including the bestseller
A History of Reading, which obtained the Prix Médicis (France, 1996), as well as novels, including News from a Foreign Country Came (1991), which won the McKitterick Prize for a first novel (Great Britain, 1992).

 

http://www.alberto.manguel.com