Alberto (Adrian) Manguel

Biography:

Alberto Manguel is a New York–based, Argentine-Canadian writer of fiction and nonfiction as well as an editor, translator, reviewer, and educator. He was born in Buenos Aires and spent his early years in Tel Aviv, where his father served as the first Argentinian ambassador to Israel. As a teenager, after returning to Argentina, he was asked to read aloud to the blind Jorge Luis Borges, which he did for several years. Manguel left for Europe before the horrors of the “disappeared” began and lived and worked in France, England, Italy, and Tahiti before moving to Toronto in the 1980s and becoming a Canadian citizen. He is the author of the novels All Men Are Liars (2010), Stevenson Under the Palm Trees (2004), and News from a Foreign Country Came (1991), and numerous nonfiction books, including Fabulous Monsters: Dracula, Alice, Superman, and Other Literary Friends (2019), Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions (2018), Curiosity (2015), and A Reader on Reading (2010), all published by Yale University Press; Monsieur Bovary et autres personnages (2014); The Traveller, the Tower, and the Worm: The Reader as Metaphor (2013); The Library at Night (2006); and With Borges (2004). Publications also include radio and TV dramas; a play (The Kipling Play); articles in, among others, Threepenny Review, Parnassus, CN Review, El País (Madrid), Le Monde (Paris), Partisan Review, London Review of Books, Sunday Times (London), Food and Wine, and Globe and Mail (Toronto); and more than 20 anthologies including Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature, Dark Arrows: Chronicles of Revenge, The Oxford Book of Canadian Ghost Stories, The Gates of Paradise: The Anthology of Erotic Short Fiction, Mothers and Daughters, Fathers and Sons, and The Ark in the Garden: New Fables for Our Times. Honors and awards include Officer of the Order of Canada, Gutenberg Prize, Commandeur de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, and Prix Médicis Essai. Academic and other professional positions include director of the National Library of Argentina; Visiting Professor at Princeton, Columbia, and McGill Universities; inaugural Robertson Davies Lecturer at the Kingston Literary Festival; director of the Festival Atlantide in Nantes, France; Rosenbach Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania; head of the Maclean Hunter Arts Journalism Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts; artistic adviser for the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, contributing editor to Grand Street, and staff drama critic for “State of the Arts” on CBC Radio in Toronto. At Bard since 2020.

 

Contact:

Website: http://www.manguel.com