Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges grew up in Buenos Aires in a house with an English grandmother and a library he later said he never really left. His father, a lawyer, was losing his sight to a hereditary condition and the boy knew early he would likely lose his too. The family spent the First World War in Geneva, where he learned French and German, and he returned to Argentina in 1921 writing poetry that few people read.

In 1937, needing money, he took a job as a junior assistant at a small municipal library in a poor suburb. There were fewer than a thousand books, and his colleagues, who finished the work in an hour, asked him to slow down so they would not all look bad. He cataloged in the mornings and spent the afternoons in the basement writing. On Christmas Eve 1938 he struck his head on an open window, developed septicaemia and, terrified that the injury had damaged his mind, wrote a story to find out. It became Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, the first of the fictions that made his name.

In 1946 the Perón government made him a poultry inspector in the municipal markets, as a joke. He resigned and lectured for a living. When Perón fell in 1955 he was appointed director of the National Library, by which time he could no longer read. He called it God\'s magnificent irony, granting him at once the books and the night. He died in Geneva in 1986.