Alberto Manguel

Alberto Manguel

Manguel in 2013
Born Alberto Manguel
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 (born 1948 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine Canadian anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist and editor. 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.

For over 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.

Career

Manguel spent his first years in Israel where his father was the Argentine ambassador, returning to his native country at the age of seven. Later, in Buenos Aires, when Manguel was still a teenager, he met the writer Jorge Luis Borges, a customer of the Pygmalion Anglo-German bookshop in Buenos Aires where Manguel worked after school. As Borges was almost blind, he would ask others to read out loud for him, and Manguel became one of Borges' readers, several times a week from 1964 to 1968.

In Buenos Aires, Manguel attended the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires from 1961 to 1966; among his teachers were notable Argentinian intellectuals such as the historian Alberto Salas, the Cervantes scholar Isaias Lerner and the literary critic Enrique Pezzoni. Manguel did one year (1967) at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Filosofía y Letras, but he abandoned his studies and started working at the recently founded Editorial Galerna of Guillermo Schavelzon (who thirty-five years later, now established in Barcelona, was to become Manguel's literary agent). In 1969 Manguel travelled to Europe and worked as a reader for various publishing companies: Denoël, Gallimard and Les Lettres Nouvelles in Paris, and Calder & Boyars in London.

1970s

In 1971, Manguel, living then in Paris and London, was awarded the Premio La Nación (Buenos Aires) for a collection of short stories. The prize was shared with the writer Bernardo Schiavetta. In 1972 Manguel returned to Buenos Aires and worked for a year as a reporter for the newspaper La Nación. In 1974, he was offered employment as foreign editor at the Franco Maria Ricci publishing company in Milan. Here he met Gianni Guadalupi and later, at Guadalupi's suggestion, wrote with him The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. The book is a travel guide to 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 Francois Rabelais, Jonathan Swift, and J.R.R. Tolkien. In 1976, Manguel moved to Tahiti, where he worked as editor for Les Éditions du Pacifique until 1977. He then worked for the same company in Paris for one year. In 1978 Manguel settled in Milford, Surrey (England) and set up the short-lived Ram Publishing Company. In 1979, Manguel returned to Tahiti to work again for Les Éditions du Pacifique, this time until 1982.

1980s–1990s

In 1982 Manguel moved to Toronto, Ontario, Canada and lived there (with a brief European period) until 2000. He has been a Canadian citizen ever since. Here Manguel contributed regularly to The Globe and Mail (Toronto), The Times Literary Supplement (London), The Village Voice (New York), The Washington Post, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Review of Books, The New York Times and the Svenska Dagbladet (Stockholm), and reviewed books and plays for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 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." (from Passages: Welcome Home to Canada (2002), with preface by Rudyard Griffiths).[1] 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."[2]

In 1983, he selected the stories for what is perhaps his best-known anthology Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature. His first novel, "News From a Foreign Country Came", won the McKitterick Prize in 1992.

He was appointed as the Distinguished Visiting Writer in the Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Writers Program at the University of Calgary from 1997 to 1999. Manguel was the Opening Lecturer at the "Exile & Migration" Congress, Boston University, in June 1999, and the Times Literary Supplement lecturer in 1997.

2000s

In 2000, Manguel moved to the Poitou-Charentes region of France, where he and his partner have purchased and renovated a medieval presbytery. Among the renovations is an oak-panelled library to house Manguel's nearly 40,000 books.[3]

Manguel held the Cátedra Cortázar at the Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2007 and the S. Fischer Chair at the Freie Universität Berlin, in 2003. In 2007, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège.

Manguel delivered the 2007 Massey Lectures which were later published as The City of Words and in the same year delivered the Northrop Frye-Antonine Maillet Lecture in Moncton, New Brunswick. He was the Pratt Lecturer at Memorial University of Newfoundland, in 2003.

In 2008, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris honoured Alberto Manguel as part of its 30th Anniversary Celebrations, by inviting him to set up a 3-month long program of lectures, film and round tables.

He writes a regular column for Geist magazine.

Manguel's book "History of Reading" was referenced as a source of inspiration to the Book of Sand film.[4] He suffered a stroke in December 2013, and reflected on the experience in a 2014 op-ed in The New York Times.[5]

In December 2015 he was named director of the National Library in his native Argentina, replacing Horacio González. He will formally take charge in July 2016.

Bibliography

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Novels

Anthologies

Non-fiction

Critical studies and reviews

Awards

See also

References

  1. ↑ THE PENGUIN DICTIONARY OF POPULAR CANADIAN QUOTATIONS - John Robert Colombo - Penguin Books
  2. ↑ Alberto Manguel by Robert Birnbaum, The Morning News
  3. ↑ Alberto Manguel – Speaking at his and David Mason's lecture "You Are What You Read" at Kingston WritersFest, on Sat. 28 Sep. 2013, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada
  4. ↑ Video on YouTube
  5. ↑ Alberto Manguel (March 7, 2014). "Thoughts that Can't Be Spoken". The New York Times. Retrieved March 9, 2014.

External links

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