Alberto Manguel | |
|---|---|
.JPG) Manguel in 2013 | |
| Born | Alberto Manguel March 13, 1948 Buenos Aires, Argentina |
| Nationality | Argentinian, Canadian, French |
| Period | 1980–present |
| Genre | Novel, essay |
| Notable works | A History of Reading, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places |
Alberto Manguel OC FRSL (born March 13, 1948, in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine-Canadian anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, editor, and a former director of the National Library of Argentina. He is a cosmopolitan and polyglot scholar, speaking English, Spanish, German, and French fluently, and also Italian and Portuguese at a very advanced level. He left Argentina at the age of twenty, in 1968. He has lived in Israel (Tel Aviv, 1948-1955), Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1955-1968), France (Paris, 1968-1971, and Poitou-Charentes, 2000-2015), United Kingdom (London, 1972), Italy (Milan, 1974-1979), French Polynesia (Tahiti, 1973-1974), Canada (Toronto, 1980-2000), United States (New York; 2015-2020) and Portugal (Lisbon, since 2021). Since 2021 he has directed an international center for reading studies in Lisbon, baptized in 2023 as Espaço Atlântida; In the biography of the center's website you can read: "He became a Canadian citizen and continues to identify his nationality as first and foremost Canadian."[1]
He is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (co-written with Gianni Guadalupi in 1980), A History of Reading (1996), The Library at Night (2007) and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography (2008); and novels such as News From a Foreign Country Came (1991). Though almost all of Manguel's books were written in English, two of his novels (El regreso and Todos los hombres son mentirosos) were written in Spanish, and El regreso has not yet been published in English. Manguel has also written film criticism such as Bride of Frankenstein (1997) and collections of essays such as Into the Looking Glass Wood (1998). In 2007, Manguel was selected to be that year's annual lecturer for the prestigious Massey Lectures. in 2021, he gave the Roger Lancelyn Green lecture to the Lewis Carroll Society on his love of the 'Alice' stories from Lewis Carroll.
For more than twenty years, Manguel has edited a number of literary anthologies on a variety of themes or genres ranging from erotica and gay stories to fantastic literature and mysteries.