Biography of Gabriel García Márquez

Full name: Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez

Place of birth: Aracataca, Colombia

Date of birth: March 6, 1927

Died: April 17, 2014 in Mexico City, Mexico

Literary genres: Novels / Short Stories

Featured books: Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera, No One Writes to the Colonel, Of Love and Other Demons, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, more books...

Son of Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán, Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca, in the department of Magdalena, Colombia.

He started his secondary studies in San José in 1940 and finished his high school degree at the Colegio Liceo of Zipaquirá, on December 12, 1946. He enrolled in the Faculty of Law from the National University of Bogotá on February 25, 1947, although without showing excessive interest in studies. His friendship with the doctor and writer Manuel Zapata Olivella allowed him access to journalism. Immediately after the "Bogotazo" (the murder of the liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Bogotá, the subsequent demonstrations and their brutal repression), they began their collaborations in the liberal newspaper El Universal.

García Márquez married in Barranquilla in 1958 with Mercedes Barcha, the daughter of an apothecary. In 1959 they had their first son, Rodrigo, who became a filmmaker; and three years later, his second child was born, Gonzalo, graphic designer with a degree in Fine Arts.

At the age of twenty-seven he published his first novel, "La Hojarasca" , in which he already pointed out the most characteristic features of his work of fiction, full of overflowing fantasy.

But the worldwide notoriety of García Márquez began when "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was published in June 1967, and in one week it sold 8,000 copies. From then on, success was assured, and the novel sold a new edition every week, going on to sell half a million copies in three years. It was translated into more than twenty-four languages, and won four international awards. Success had finally arrived and the writer was 40 years old when the world learned his name. Through fan correspondence, awards, interviews, appearances; It was obvious that his life had changed. In 1969 the novel won the Chianciano Aprecia in Italy and was named the "Best Foreign Book" in France. In 1970, it was published in English and was chosen as one of the best twelve books of the year in the United States.

García Márquez has received numerous awards, distinctions and tributes for his works; the greatest of them all, the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 "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", according to the laudatory of the Swedish Academy.

On Thursday, April 17, 2014, at the age of 87, Gabriel García Márquez, one of the most admired and recognized authors of Latin American literature, died in Mexico City.