Alberto Manguel
ARGENTINA-CANADA, 1948
FORMENTOR LITERATURE PRIZE 2017
ALFONSO REYES INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2017
Alberto Manguel is an Argentinian-Canadian writer, translator, editor and critic, born in Buenos Aires in 1948. He has published several novels, and non-fiction, including Fabulous Monsters, Packing My Library, Curiosity, With Borges, A History of Reading, The Library at Night and (together with Gianni Guadalupi) The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.
He has received numerous international awards, among others the Commander of the Order of Arts & Letters from France, the Formentor Prize and the Alfonso Reyes Prize in 2017, and the Gutenberg Prize 2018. He is doctor honoris causa of the universities of Ottawa and York in Canada, and Liège in Belgium and Anglia Ruskin in Cambridge, UK. He was the director of the National Library of Argentina. In September of 2020 Alberto Manguel donates his library, composed of about 40 thousand volumes, to the City of Lisbon, and since 2021, he has been directing the Atlântida Space, a study center for the history of reading, in that city.
La Vanguardia - Alfonso Reyes International Prize 2017 (Spanish)
"Manguel leaps across the traditional barriers between literature,
literary history and academia with a virtuosity that leaves the reader
breathless. He is the Montaigne of our time and for this latest work,
if they send a new robot to Mars, they ought to name it: ‘Manguel'."
John Sutherland
«His work is one of the most lucid explorations of the organic history of the universal library in world literature»
Jury of the Premio Formentor de las Letras 2017
"Manguel is a literary magpie whose beady eye falls on unconsidered trifles."
Allan Massie
PUBLISHED BY: Spanish worldwide RBA / LUMEN / BRUGUERA / ALIANZA / ALMADÍA / NAVONA / NÓRDICA LIBROS / SIGLO XXI / UNAM | Arabic DAR AL SAQI | Brazil COMPANHIA DAS LETRAS / PLANETA / AYINÉ / EDIÇÔES SESC | Bulgaria PROZORETS | Canada KNOPF / RANDOM HOUSE / THOMAS ALLEN / QUATTRO BOOKS | Canada Fr. LEMEAC / BAYOU PRESS / BOREAL | Catalan DÍAS CONTADOS | China THE COMMERCIAL PRESS / EAST CHINA NORMAL / YUNNAN / CATHAY / SHANGAI CENTURY PUBLISHING / HORIZON MEDIA / NANJING UNIVERSITY PRESS / GUANGXI NORMAL UNIVERSITY PRESS / SHANGHAI CULTURE PUBLISHING HOUSE | Croatia PROMETEJ / FRAKTURA | Czech Republic HOST | Denmark GYLDENDAL | Estonia LUMEMANA | France ACTES SUD / JBE BOOKS / LES BELLES LETTRES | Germany FISCHER / DIOGENES | Greece LIVANIS | Israel ZMORA BITAN / KINNERET ZMORA | Indonesia MARJIN KIRI | Italy ARCHINTO / ADELPHI / EINAUDI / NOTETTEMPO / LETTERE / FELTRINELLI / PALAZZO DUCALE / VITA E PENSIERO (UNIVERSITÀ CATTOLICA) / SELLERIO | Japan KODANSHA / HAKUSUISHA | Korea KUNGREE / SEJONG BOOKS / KYOBO BOOKS / THENAN / WISDOMHOUSE PUBLISHING |North Macedonia ARTKONEKT | Norway ASCHEHOUG | Poland PIW / WYDAWNICTWO DRZAZGI | Portugal DOM QUIXOTE / TEOREMA / TINTA DA CHINA / GRUPO ALMEDINA | Russia U-FACTORY / IVAN LIMBAKH / ALPINA | Romania NEMIRA / BAROQUE / TREI | Serbia GEOPOETIKA | Slovenia CANKARJEVA ZALOZBA / BELETRINA | Sweden ORDFRONT FÖRLAG / ELLERSTROM | Thailand MATHICON / BOOKSCAPE | Taiwan COMMERCIAL PRESS | The Netherlands AMBO ANTHOS / DE GEUS | Türkiye YAPI KREDI / KIRMIZI KEDI / INKA KITAP | UK ALMA BOOKS / YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS | Ukraine KOMORA | USA RIVERHEAD / YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS / QUATTRO BOOKS | Switzerland ALTER EGO / HERODIOS | Film Rights ALBERTA FILMWORKS / NOMAD FILMS
By Alberto Manguel
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Homer's Iliad & Odyssey. A Biography
NON FICTION, 2024
A worldwide exploration of the history, purpose, and inescapable influence of The Iliad and The Odyssey that will inspire readers to think anew about Homer's work No one knows whether Homer...
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The Backside of Tapestry: Notes on the Art of Translation
ESSAY, 2023
«Every translation is a transposition. In the Middle Ages, the word translatio denoted the movement of a saint's relics from one place to another: translation therefore as displacement, as...
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INTERVIEW, 2022
He has been called «King of readers», «Don Juan of libraries» and «Monsieur Lecture». Alberto Manguel is first and foremost a reader, and he made this known to...
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COOKBOOKS, 2021
THE FIRST BOOK OF (LITERARY) RECIPES BY ALBERTO MANGUEL WITH ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR This book has devil-lovers soup, dragon omelet, sorcerer's fingers, dinoburgers, and...
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NARRATIVE ESSAY, 2019
An original look at how literary characters can transcend their books to guide our lives, by one of the world's most eminent bibliophiles. Alberto Manguel, in a style both charming and erudite,...
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Essay, 2019
It is possible to summarize the meaning of Alberto Manguel's essay with the author's own words: «The reality of Cervantes' world [...] can only be faithfully portrayed through approximations...
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Monsieur Bovary (and other loyal friends)
COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES, 2018
"In contrast to their readers, who grow old and will never be young again, imaginary characters are both the people they were when we first read them and also the people they become over...
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NON FICTION, 2017
When early this century Alberto Manguel set up a library of 35,000 books in a former presbytery in a village in the Loire Valley, he thought that he'd found a home for his books, and himself,...
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NON FICTION, 2015
Manguel writes about his new work, Curiosity: “Our education systems today refuse to acknowledge the second half of our quests. Interested in little else than material efficiency and...
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The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm
NON FICTION, 2013
As far as one can tell, human beings are the only species for which the world seems made up of stories, Alberto Manguel writes. We read the book of the world in many guises: we may be travelers,...
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NON FICTION, 2011
Reader, writer, anthologist and translator. Alberto Manguel lives among books. In these conversations with French editor Claude Rouquet, he goes through his experiences and talks about childhood,...
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NON FICTION, 2010
Anyone who has lost their faith in the value of literature or doubts that classic fiction can help us to understand the contemporary world, must read this book. Beginning with the Nineveh tablets,...
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NON FICTION, 2010
In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. "We come into the world intent on finding narrative in...
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NOVEL, 2008
A French journalist is determined to clarify the inexplicable death of a brilliant South American writer, Alejandro Bevilacqua, in the still shady Madrid of the nineteen seventies. But after...
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NON FICTION. 2006
The Library at Night is Manguel’s most important book since A History of Reading . This time, Manguel attempts to answer the question: why do we believe that we can organize the universe?...
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ESSAY, 2006
The title of this book refers to the famous Erasmus essay. For him, madness, that “joyful aberration of the mind,” explained the many nonsensical activities in which humans get...
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NOVEL, 2006
A genius of erotic minimalism, Anatole Vasanpeine is a little-known (and imaginary) character from the early 20th century town of Poitiers. History remembers him for one extraordinary trait: his...
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NOVEL, 2006
Every exile is offset by a return, or at least the possibility of a return. N.A. Fabris’s return to his home town brings him face to face with a reality that owes its existence to both...
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NON FICTION , 2004
“There is a vast group of people who once read out loud to Borges: little Boswells who are often unaware of the others but who collectively maintain the memory of one of the most lucid...
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NON FICTION, 2004
While traveling in Calgary, Alberto Manguel was stuck by how the novel he was reading (Goethe's Elective Affinities ) seemed to reflect the social chaos of the world in which he was living....
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Stevenson under the Palm Trees
NOVEL, 2002
Robert Louis Stevenson is enjoying life on the humid, colourful island of Samoa until rape, murder and the appearance of his doppelgänger, Mr. Baker, change everything. With this playful...
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NON FICTION, 2000
"After all, every picture is a history of love and hate when read from the appropriate angle", wrote Leopoldo Salas-Nicanor in 1731, and in this marvellously illuminating book Alberto Manguel sets...
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NON FICTION, 1998
Best known for his Jungle Books and his Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling was a complex and fascinating writer. Born in Bombay, sent to the England of his parents at the age of five and left for...
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NON FICTION, 1996
1998 PRIX MÉDICIS From clay tablets to CD-ROM, from book thieves to book burners, bibliophiles, book fools and saints, this discursive essay (with 140 illustrations) on the mysteries...
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News from a foreign country came
NOVEL, 1991
This is a portrait of an apparently ordinary family and explores what is known, unknown and unknowable between close relatives. Set in Canada, in French colonial Algeria at the time of the...
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The Dictionary of Imaginary Places
NON FICTION, 1980
In Ancient Times it seemed as though a whole universe stretched beyond the Pillars of Hercules, in which everything was possible, but today, when the last stretch of “terra incognita”...
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