Manguel, Alberto

Alberto Manguel was born in Buenos Aires in 1948, and is now a Canadian citizen. After spending his childhood in Israel, where his father was the Argentine ambassador, he attended school in Argentina. In 1968 he left for Europe and, with the exception of one year back in Buenos Aires where he worked as a journalist for the newspaper La Nacion, he lived in Spain, France, England and Italy earning an itinerant living as a reader for various publishing companies. In the mid-seventies he was offered (and accepted) a job as assistant editor at Les Editions du Pacifique, a publishing company in Tahiti. In 1982, after the publication of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (written with Gianni Guadalupi) he moved to Canada. He has edited a dozen anthologies of short stories on themes ranging from fantastic literature to erotic literature, and he has written several books of fiction and non-fiction. Among them, A History of Reading, translated into over thirty languages, Into the Looking-Glass Wood, Reading Pictures, and the novels News From A Foreign Country Came and Stevenson Under the Palm Trees. He contributes regularly to newspapers and magazines around the world. He currently lives in France.