His full name was Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo. Borges' mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from an old Uruguayan family. His 1929 book Cuaderno San Martín included a poem "Isidoro Acevedo," commemorating his maternal grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, a soldier of the Buenos Aires Army, fighting against Juan Manuel de Rosas. A descendant of the Argentine lawyer and politician Francisco Narciso de Laprida, Acevedo fought in the battles of Cepeda (1859), Pavón (1861) and Los Corrales (1880). He died in 1905 of pulmonary congestion in the same house Serrano Street, Buenos Aires, where his grandson Borges was born.

Borges' father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was a lawyer and psychology teacher with literary aspirations. His father was part Spanish, part Portuguese, and half British; At his home, both Spanish and English were spoken and from earliest childhood Borges was bilingual, reading Shakespeare, in English, at the age of 12.
Jorge Guillermo Borges was forced into early retirement from the legal profession owing to the same failing eyesight that would eventually afflict his son, and in 1914, the family moved to Geneva. Borges senior was treated by a Geneva eye specialist, while his son, and daughter Norah attended school. There Borges junior learned French, initially with some difficulties, and taught himself German. He received his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918.

After World War I ended, the Borges family spent three years variously in Lugano (Switzerland), Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid. In Spain, Borges became a member of the avant-garde Ultraist literary movement. There he frequented such notable Spanish writers as Rafael Cansinos Assens and Ramón Gómez de la Serna.

In 1921, Borges returned with his family to Buenos Aires where he imported the doctrine of Ultraism and launched his career as a writer by publishing poems and essays in literary journals. Borges' first collection of poetry was Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923). Co-founded the journals Prisma and Proa. He was, from the first issue, a regular contributor to Sur, founded in 1931 by Victoria Ocampo, then Argentina's most important literary journal. Ocampo herself introduced Borges to Adolfo Bioy Casares, another well-known figure of Argentine literature, who was to become a frequent collaborator.

During these years Macedonio Fernández became a major influence on Borges, who inherited the friendship from his father. The two would hold court in cafés, country retreats, or Macedonio's tiny apartment in the Balvanera district.

In 1933 Borges gained an editorial appointment at the literary supplement of the newspaper Crítica, where he first published the pieces later collected as the Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy). This involved two types of pieces. The first lay somewhere between non-fictional essays and short stories, using fictional techniques to tell essentially true stories. The second consisted of literary forgeries, which Borges initially passed off as translations of passages from famous but seldom-read works.

In 1937, friends of Borges found him work at the Miguel Cané branch of the Buenos Aires Municipal Library as a first assistant. His fellow employees forbade Borges from cataloging more than 100 books per day, a task which would take him about one hour. The rest of his time he spent in the basement of the library, writing articles and short stories. When Juan Perón came to power in 1946, Borges was fired, and "promoted" to the position of poultry inspector for the Buenos Aires municipal market (he immediately resigned; he always referred to the title of the post he never filled as "Poultry and Rabbit Inspector"). His offenses against the Peronistas up to that time had apparently consisted of little more than adding his signature to pro-democratic petitions, but shortly after his resignation he addressed the Argentine Society of Letters saying, in his characteristic style, "Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy."

Borges' father died in 1938, a great blow: father and son were very close. On Christmas Eve 1938, Borges suffered a severe head wound in an accident; during treatment, he nearly died of septicemia. (He based his 1944 short story El Sur ["The South"] on this event.) While recovering from the accident, he began writing in a style he became famous for, and his first collection of short stories, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths) appeared in 1941. The book included El sur, a piece that incorporated some autobiographical elements—notably the accident—and which Borges later called "perhaps my best story." Though generally well received, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan failed to garner for him the literary prizes many in his circle expected.

Left without a job, his vision beginning to fade due to glaucoma, and unable to fully support himself as a writer, Borges began a new career as a public lecturer obtaining appointments as President of the Argentine Society of Writers (1950–1953), and as Professor of English and American Literature (1950–1955) at the Argentine Association of English Culture. His short story Emma Zunz was turned into a film (under the name of Días de odio (English title: Days of Wrath), directed in 1954, by the Argentine director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson.

In 1955 the new anti-Peronist military government appointed him head of the National Library. By that time, he had become fully blind.

The following year he received the National Prize for Literature from the University of Cuyo, the first of many honorary doctorates. From 1956 to 1970, Borges also held a position as a professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires, while frequently holding temporary appointments at other universities.

His eyesight deteriorating, he increasingly relied on his mother's help. When he was no longer able to read and write (he never learned the Braille system), his mother, to whom he had always been close, became his personal secretary.

Borges first appeared in English translation in the August 1948 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine; the story was "The Garden of Forking Paths," the translator Anthony Boucher.Several other Borges translations appeared in literary magazines and anthologies during the 1950s, his international fame dates from the early 1960s. In 1961, he received the Formentor Prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. While Beckett was well-known and respected in the English-speaking world, and Borges at this time remained unknown and untranslated, English-speaking readers became curious about the other recipient of the prize.

He also continued to publish books, among them El libro de los seres imaginarios (The Book of Imaginary Beings, (1967, co-written with Margarita Guerrero), El informe de Brodie (Dr. Brodie's Report, 1970), and El libro de arena (The Book of Sand, 1975).

Borges was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Especially in the 1980s, when he was clearly growing old and infirm, the failure to grant him the prize became a glaring omission. It was speculated that he was considered unfit to receive the award because of his tacit support of, or unwillingness to condemn, the military dictatorships that were being established in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and elsewhere.

When Perón returned from exile and was re-elected president in 1973, Borges immediately resigned as director of the National Library.

In 1967 Borges married recently widowed Elsa Astete Millán. It was believed that his mother, who was 90, and anticipating her own death, wanted to find someone to care for her blind son. The marriage lasted less than three years. After a legal separation, Borges moved back in with his mother, with whom he lived until her death at 99.Thereafter, he lived alone in the small flat he had shared with her, cared for by Fanny, their housekeeper of many decades.

After 1975, the year his mother died, Borges began to travel all over the world, up to the time of his death. He was often accompanied in these travels by his personal assistant María Kodama, an Argentine woman of Japanese and German ancestry.

Jorge Luis Borges died of liver cancer in 1986 in Geneva and is buried in the Cimetière des Rois (Plainpalais). A few months before his death, an attorney in Paraguay married him to Maria Kodama. Kodama, as sole inheritor of a significant annual income, has control over his works.

Source: Wikipedia