Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), one of the leading poets of Latin America, was born in Buenos Aires in 1899. His grandmother was English but otherwise the family was Argentine, of Spanish origin. Borges studied in Switzerland and later in Spain, where he became associated with the avant-garde movement. Returning to the Argentine, he was active in literary reviews which created a ferment in Argentinian poetry, stimulating young writers to new forms of expression. Besides poetry, he published criticism, stories, philosophical essays, translations (of such writers as André Gide, Kafka, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf), and edited anthologies of prose and verse. He passed away in 1986.