Speaking on a New Yorker podcast in 2007, Paul Theroux noted that Jorge Luis Borges is "a bad influence. No one [else] can be a Borges ... in terms of magic and scholarship I think he's inimitable." For Latin American writers, whether they liked him or not, he revolutionised the way language was used. "Borges is one of the authors whom I most read and whom I probably like the least," Gabriel García Márquez once said. "I read Borges for his extraordinary ability at verbal artifice; he's a man who teaches you how to write ... to sharpen your instrument for saying things."
In 1961 Borges won a major European award, the Prix Formentor, the success increasing his renown in his native Argentina as well as throughout Europe and the United States. He shared the prize with Samuel Beckett, with whom he represents, in Brian Dillon's words, the "obscure conduit ... from modernism to postmodernism".
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