Jorge Luis Borges

Blind by his fifties from a hereditary condition, Borges spent decades running a branch library and later Argentina's National Library, guided by the very darkness that ended his eyesight, not his reading. He trained as a poet and essayist in Geneva and Spain before returning to Buenos Aires, where he found his true form: the short prose piece that reads like an encyclopedia entry from an impossible science.

Perón's government demoted him from librarian to poultry inspector for signing an anti-Peronist petition; he resigned rather than comply, then watched the coup that toppled Perón return him to the profession, and to a directorship, in 1955, the same year his blindness became total. He translated Kafka and Woolf into Spanish, co-wrote detective fictions with his friend Bioy Casares under joint pseudonyms, and toured widely as a lecturer once fame arrived late, via The Aleph and Ficciones.

He never wrote a novel, only insisted the form was unnecessary once you'd perfected the paragraph. He died in Geneva, the city of his adolescence, in 1986.