Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez was a Colombian novelist, short story writer and journalist, born in Aracataca in 1927 and raised there in part by his maternal grandparents. Their stories and the town's memory of a nearby banana plantation boom later shaped much of his fiction. He worked as a reporter before turning fully to fiction, and spent long periods abroad, including in Mexico, where he lived for many years. His novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967, made him famous across the world and became a landmark of Latin American writing. He is closely associated with magical realism, a style in which extraordinary events are told in the same calm voice as ordinary ones. His books explore love, memory, power, loneliness and the history of Latin America. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. He died in 2014, and he remains one of the most widely read authors of the twentieth century.