Alberto Manguel

Alberto Manguel OC FRSL 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, French and, fluently, also Italian and Portuguese at a very advanced level. He left Argentina at the age of twenty, in 1968. He has lived in Israel, Argentina, France, United Kingdom, Italy, French Polynesia, Canada, United States and Portugal. 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."
He is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, A History of Reading, The Library at Night and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography; and novels such as News From a Foreign Country Came. Though almost all of Manguel's books were written in English, two of his novels were written in Spanish, and El regreso has not yet been published in English.