Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899. His family moved to Europe in 1914, and to Spain in 1918, where Borges was in close touch with the young vangardist poets, especially those of the so-called ultraista group. In 1921 Borges returned to Buenos Aires, where he was quickly recognized as one of the principal poets of the Argentine vanguard. In the early thirties, after a long illness, his literary activity tended more and more away from poetry and toward the essay and short story. It was the publication of two volumes of his stories, Ficciones and El Aleph, to which Borges owes his international fame. In 1961 he shared the Prix International des Editeurs with Samuel Beckett. Borges is widely regarded as Latin America's most influential prose writer, and all of the major South American writers of the current generation, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Julio Cortazar, have acknowledged their debt to him. His first collection of stories in English was Labyrinths, and since then a number of volumes have appeared, including Ficciones, The Aleph and Other Stories, A Personal Anthology, Dreamtigers, Dr. Brodie's Report, and In Praise of Darkness. An edition of his Selected Poems has also been published. Borges died in 1986.