Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A giant of South American literature and a master of magical realism, Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1927 in the Caribbean region of Colombia and was brought up largely by his grandparents. Whilst studying law at the National University of Colombia, he began his career in journalism and went on to work as a reporter in Paris and New York, finally setting in New Mexico, also spending a considerable amount of time in Cuba and Spain.

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Biography

Marquez published his first novel The Leaf of Storm in 1955, followed by In Evil Hour in 1962, but it was his 1967 book One Hundred Years of Solitude – a dream-like, dynastic epic set in a fictional isolated town whose history has been seen as a microcosm of the history of Latin America – that rocketed Marquez to international literary fame and became one of the best known and defining classics of South American magic realism. His other masterpieces include The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), a shrewd and compelling story of a Caribbean dictator; Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), an enthralling tale of the passage of time and enduring passion; and The General in His Labyrinth (1989), a captivating chronicle of Simón Bolívar’s final days.

In 1972, Marquez won the highly prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature and a decade later he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts’.

Marquez died of pneumonia on 17 April 2014 in Mexico City at the age of 87. In 2023, it was announced his novel Until August would be published posthumously in 2024.