Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude and gave Latin American literature a global readership. Born in Aracataca, Colombia in 1927, he was raised for his first eight years by his grandparents — a retired colonel who told him about the war and the banana company massacre, and a grandmother who recounted ghosts and omens in a matter-of-fact voice that he said was the tone of his fiction. He studied law without enthusiasm and became a journalist, working in Cartagena, Barranquilla and Bogotá. His 1955 newspaper serial about a shipwrecked sailor exposed government smuggling and forced him abroad. He worked as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Caracas and New York, and for Prensa Latina, the Cuban news agency. He wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude in eighteen months in Mexico City, pawning household goods to keep going and reportedly unable to afford the postage to send the whole manuscript at once. Published in 1967, it follows seven generations of the Buendía family in the invented town of Macondo, and treats the miraculous — a girl ascending to heaven while folding sheets, four years of rain, a plague of insomnia — in exactly the register used for the ordinary. That flat acceptance is what the term magical realism describes. Love in the Time of Cholera, The Autumn of the Patriarch and Chronicle of a Death Foretold followed. He was a lifelong friend of Fidel Castro, which he was criticised for and never disowned, and he mediated quietly between the Colombian government and guerrillas. He received the Nobel Prize in 1982, and died in Mexico City in 2014.
- Lived: 1927 CE – 2014 CE
- Nationality: Colombian
- Roles: writer, journalist
