Wednesday, February 13, 2019, London.- Yesterday at the Sarmiento Room of the Embassy of Argentina, Henry Eliot presented the 24th Borges Lecture titled "The Labyrinth of Letters". The event was organized by the Anglo Argentine Society with the collaboration of Canning House.

Henry Eliot is the creative editor of Penguin Classics at Penguin Random House, who publishes Borges in the English language in the United Kingdom. He is the author of three books: The Penguin Classics Book (2018), Follow This Thread: A Maze Book to Get Lost In (2018), and with Matt Lloyd-Rose, Curiocity (2016). He also created an interactive edition of Shakespeare's The Tempest (called iPad App of the Year by Apple in 2016), directed two re-creations of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and wrote speeches for the British Government's Chief Scientific Advisor.

The Borges Lecture, instituted in 1983 with a presentation by Borges himself, is an important part of the Anglo Argentine Society's mission to promote Argentine culture in the United Kingdom and to build bridges between our two countries.

The conferences were annual until 2000 and were most of them published. The first book, "In Memory of Borges," contains the lectures by Borges, Graham Greene, H.S. Ferns, Mario Vargas Llosa and Alicia Jurado. The second book, "The Borges Tradition", includes lectures by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Angela Carter, Carlos Fuentes, Simon Collier and Adolfo Bioy Casares. The third book, "The Borges Lectures" includes works by P.D. James, Jorge Edwards, Hugh Thomas and Marcos Aguinis. Recent speakers include Nicholas Shakespeare, Alberto Manguel, Professor Edwin Williamson of the University of Oxford (2014), Professor Emeritus John King (2015) and Dr. Humberto R. Núñez Faraco of University College London (2017).

The event was fully booked, with more than 80 attendees and the participation of authorities, diplomats, relevant figures of the local Anglo-Argentine community and special guests. Of special interest was the passion with which the speaker expressed himself about the work of Jorge Luis Borges, to whom he dedicated a good part of his investigative work and who, as can be seen in his recent book, has given him great inspiration.

This year, two Borges Lectures will be held, given that in 2018 none were made. The second will be by Andrew Graham-Yooll OBE, author of Goodbye Buenos Aires and former editor of the Buenos Aires Herald on July 23, at the Official Residence.