Borges left everything to the woman he married seven weeks before he died; she died without a will

María Kodama became Jorge Luis Borges's literary secretary after his mother died in 1975. Borges left her his author's rights in a 1979 will and his whole estate in 1985. They married through representatives in a civil proceeding in Paraguay on 26 April 1986. Borges died of cancer in Geneva seven weeks later. Kodama became sole owner of the estate. She ended the agreement under which Norman Thomas di Giovanni had translated Borges into English, and new translations by Andrew Hurley replaced his. In 2006 the French writer Pierre Assouline called her "an obstacle to the dissemination of the works of Borges"; she sued him for defamation and asked for one euro. She also brought a criminal case against the writer Pablo Katchadjian over a book that expanded Borges's story "The Aleph"^†. Kodama died on 26 March 2023, aged 86, and left no will. The New York Times reported that the status of Borges's work was uncertain. An Argentine court later recognised her nephews as heirs^†.