Alberto Manguel
- Prizes judged
Alberto Manguel was born in Buenos Aires in 1948 and is an Argentine-Canadian anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, editor and a former Director of the National Library of Argentina.
Manguel is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (co-written with Gianni Guadalupi in 1980), A History of Reading (1996), The Library at Night (2007) and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography (2008); and novels such as News From a Foreign Country Came (1991).
Though almost all of Manguel’s books were written in English, two of his novels (El regreso and Todos los hombres son mentirosos) were written in Spanish. Manguel has also written film criticism such as Bride of Frankenstein (1997) and collections of essays such as Into the Looking Glass Wood (1998).
For more than 20 years, Manguel has edited a number of literary anthologies on a variety of themes or genres ranging from erotica and gay stories to fantastic literature and mysteries.
Background
Between 2005 - 2015, the Man Booker International Prize recognised one writer for their achievement in fiction.
Worth £60,000, the prize was awarded every two years to a living author who had published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language.
The winner was chosen solely at the discretion of the judging panel and there were no submissions from publishers.
The Man Booker International Prize was different from the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that it highlighted one writer’s overall contribution to fiction on the world stage. In focusing on overall literary excellence, the judges considered a writer’s body of work rather than a single novel.