García Márquez, Gabriel

García Márquez, Gabriel (1928- ), Colombian short-story writer and novelist. García Márquez was born in Aracataca, and initially trained as a journalist. He was a newspaper editor in Cartegena in 1946, in Barranquilla from 1948 to 1952, and in Bogotá in 1952. From 1959 to 1961 he worked for the Cuban news agency, La Prensa, in Colombia; Havana, Cuba; and New York. García Márquez was a liberal thinker whose left-wing politics angered conservative Colombian dictators Laureano Gómez and his successor, General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. To escape persecution, García Márquez spent the 1960s and 1970s in voluntary exile in Mexico and Spain.

His best-known novels are Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970), the epic story of a Colombian family, which shows the stylistic influence of the American novelist William Faulkner; and El otoño del patriarca (1975; The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1976), about political power and corruption. Crónica de una muerte anunciada (1981; Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1983) is the story of murder in a Latin American town. His Collected Stories was published in English translation in 1984. El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985; Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988), a story of romantic love, also takes place in Latin America. El general en su laberinto (1989; The General in His Labyrinth, 1990) is a fictional account of the last days of South American revolutionary and statesman Simón Bolívar. His 1994 novel Del amor y otros demonios was published in English as Of Love And Other Demons (1995). García Márquez is admired for his weaving of realism with fantasy in a number of novels and short stories set in Macondo, a fictional Colombian village of his own invention.

García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. He was formally invited back to Colombia, where he mediated between the Colombian government and leftist rebels in the early 1980s. His most recent works are the non-fiction Noticia de un secuestro (1996; News of a Kidnapping, 1997), about the real-life story of ten prominent Colombians taken hostage by the Pablo Escobar drug cartel, and the novel Memoria de mis putas tristes (2004; Memories of My Melancholy Whores), in which an old man looks back nostalgically on past love affairs. The first volume of his autobiography is Vivir para contarla (2002; Living to Tell the Tale, 2003).