Alberto Manguel

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Alberto Manguel is a writer, translator, and editor who was born in 1948 in Buenos Aires. Manguel wrote non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (co-written with Gianni Guadalupi in 1980) and A History of Reading (1996) and novels such as News From a Foreign Country Came (1991). Manguel also wrote film criticism such as Bride of Frankenstein (1997) and essays such as Into the Looking Glass Wood (1998). For over twenty years, Manguel has edited a number of literary anthologies for a variety of themes or genres ranging from erotica and gay stories to fantastic literature and mysteries.

Contents

[edit] Career

[edit] Early years

Manguel grew up in Israel, where his father was the Argentinian ambassador. When Manguel was still a teenager, he met and befriended Jorge Luis Borges, a renowned Argentine writer, poet, literary critic, and translator. When Manguel was sixteen years old and working during his school holidays at the Pygmalion bookshop in Buenos Aires, Borges (then 58 years old) was one of the shop's regular customers. As Borges was almost blind, he asked Manguel to read books to him in Borges' apartment, something Manguel did several times a week from 1964 to 1968.

In a 2001 interview with Robert Birnbaum, Manguel stated that he had attended a "very good high school", the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, where the teachers were university professors who were "very enthusiastic about their field[s]." After high school, Manguel "decided not to go to university", because "when I tried it, it didn’t work for me. I tried for one year and I said, 'No, this is boring and I will just try and study on my own.'” [1]

[edit] 1970s

Manguel lived in Tahiti and Europe.

[edit] 1980s-1990s

In 1980, Manguel co-wrote The Dictionary of Imaginary Places with Gianni Guadalupi. The book is a catalogue of fantasy lands, islands, cities, and other locations from world literature, including Ruritania, Shangri-La, Xanadu, Atlantis, L. Frank Baum's Oz, Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, Thomas More's Utopia, Edwin Abbott's Flatland, C. S. Lewis' Narnia, and the realms of Jonathan Swift and J. R. R. Tolkien. In 1983, Manguel selected the stories for an anthology entitled Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature.

In the mid-1980s, Manguel moved to Toronto, in central Canada, where he lived for twenty years. Manguel's early impression of Canada was that it was "...like one of those places whose existence we assume because of a name on a sign above a platform, glimpsed at as our train stops and then rushes on." He said that "...the word “Canada” awoke no echoes, inspired no images, lent no meaning to my port of destination"(from Passages: Welcome Home to Canada (2002), with preface by Rudyard Griffiths. [2]. As well, though, Manguel noted that "When I arrived in Canada, for the first time I felt I was living in a place where I could participate actively as a writer in the running of the state."[3]

Manguel's novel, News from a Foreign Country Came, won the McKitterick Prize in 1992. During the 1990s, Manguel contributed regularly to the Canadian national newspaper Globe & Mail (Toronto), the Times Literary Supplement (London), the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian Review of Books, the New York Times, and the Svenska Dagbladet (Stockholm). He was appointed as the Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Calgary.

[edit] 2000s

Manguel won several international awards and honours in the 2000s. He was named Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France, 2004), Premio German Sanchez Ruiperez for best literary criticism (Spain, 2002) and the Prix Roger Caillois (France, 2004).

He has also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In the 2000s, Manguel moved to the Poitou-Charentes region of France, where he and his partner have purchased and renovated a medieval farmhouse. Among the renovations is an oak-panelled library to house Manguel's 30,000 books.

[edit] Works

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