Gabriel García Márquez
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Gabriel García Márquez
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1982
Born: 6 March 1927, Aracataca, Colombia
Died: 17 April 2014, Mexico City, Mexico
Residence at the time of the award: Mexico
Prize motivation: “for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts”
Language: Spanish
Prize share: 1/1
Life
Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia. As a 13-year-old, he came to Bogotá to study in a secondary school. Later he began to study law, but abandoned these studies to work as a journalist and writer. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked as a foreign correspondent in Paris, New York and elsewhere. In the late 1960s he left journalism to devote himself to his creative writing full-time. Eventually García Márquez settled in Mexico City, where he lived until his death.
Work
Gabriel García Márquez’s international breakthrough came with the novel Cien años de soledad (1967) (One Hundred Years of Solitude). He is one of the foremost interpreters of magical realism in literature, a genre in which the framework narrative is set in a real place and time, but supernatural and dreamlike elements are part of the portrayal. The novels El otoño del patriarca (1975) (The Autumn of the Patriarch) and El amor en los tiempos del colera (1985) (Love in the Time of Cholera) cemented his position as one of the greatest Latin American writers of all time.
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