Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1927 in Aracataca, a town in the banana zone of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, and spent his early childhood in the house of his maternal grandparents: a colonel who had fought in the civil wars and a grandmother who told the strangest things in an unruffled voice. Both would shape his fiction. He began law studies in Bogotá but abandoned them for journalism, writing for newspapers in Cartagena, Barranquilla and Bogotá, until a 1955 series of reports for El Espectador on a navy shipwreck embarrassed the government and the paper sent him to Europe.

His early fiction — Leaf Storm, No One Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour — sketched the town of Macondo and a region worn down by war and poverty. In 1961 he settled in Mexico City, and in 1967 published One Hundred Years of Solitude, the chronicle of the Buendía family across seven generations, in which the miraculous is recounted with the same composure as the everyday. Its success was immediate and international, and it became the emblem of the Latin American ‘boom’. The Autumn of the Patriarch followed with a portrait of a Caribbean dictator in long, unbroken sentences, then Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a tightly built reconstruction of a murder everyone knew was coming.

He received the Nobel Prize in 1982, and his lecture, ‘The Solitude of Latin America’, spoke for the continent’s history of violence and endurance. Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) brought a late, generous turn to romance. He remained a working journalist and an often controversial political figure, close to Fidel Castro. He published the memoir Living to Tell the Tale in 2002 and died in Mexico City in 2014.