Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez (6 March 1927 – 17 April 2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, born in Aracataca on Colombia's Caribbean coast. He earned his living as a journalist long before he earned it as a novelist, reporting from Paris in the 1950s and later working in Bogotá and New York for the agency Prensa Latina.

He is the writer most closely identified with magical realism, in which the fantastic is narrated in the same matter-of-fact register as the everyday.

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), written in Mexico City, made his reputation worldwide; it was followed by The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) and The General in His Labyrinth (1989).

Earlier work includes Leaf Storm (1955), No One Writes to the Colonel (1961) and In Evil Hour (1962); later came the reportage News of a Kidnapping (1996) and the memoir Living to Tell the Tale (2002).

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, cited "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". He lived in Mexico City for more than three decades and died there. Until August, a short novel left unpublished at his death, appeared in 2024.