Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian author whose beguiling stories of love and longing brought Latin America to life for millions of readers and put magical realism on the literary map, died today. He was 87.
A prolific writer who started out as a newspaper reporter, Garcia Marquez‘s masterpiece was ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’ a dream-like, dynastic epic that helped him win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
Garcia Marquez died at his home in Mexico City, a source close to his family said. He had returned home from hospital last week after what doctors said was a bout of pneumonia. Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos confirmed the death.
Known affectionately to friends and fans as ’Gabo’, Garcia Marquez was Latin America‘s best-known author and most beloved author and his books have sold in the tens of millions.
Although he produced stories, essays and several short novels such as ‘Leaf Storm’ and ‘No One Writes to the Colonel’ in the 1950s and early 1960s, he struggled for years to find his voice as a novelist.
But he then found it in dramatic fashion with ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’ an instant success on publication in 1967 that was dubbed ‘Latin America‘s Don Quixote’ by late Mexican author Carlos Fuentes.
It tells the story of seven generations of the Buendia family in the fictional village of Macondo, based on the languid town of Aracataca close to Colombia‘s Caribbean coast where Garcia Marquez was born on March 6th, 1927 and raised by his maternal grandparents, Irish Times informs.
