Gabriel García Márquez (biography)

   Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracata, Colombia, in 1927. He is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. He has been a remarkable writer of the Spanish literature during the second half of the twentieth century. In 1982, He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  He was raised by his grandparents until he was 8 years old. Both of them were of a great influence in his writings. His grandmother used to tell him superstitious ghost stories, tales and popular  beliefs (she always claimed her stories to be true). “This was the origin of a magical, superstitious and supernatural vision of reality”, said once Gabriel. He has been related to the literary genre labeled as “magical realism”, which he would then use to write “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967), one of his most popular novels.

   He went to a Jesuit college and when he finished it he began to read Law, but his studies were soon broken off for his work as a journalist. He wrote and made interviews for “El Heraldo”, local paper of Barraquilla, and he became member of a group of journalists who inspired and motivated his literary career. Then, he published on “El Espectador”, a set of chronics based on interviews to a young survivor of a shipwreck ,“Chronicle of a Death Foretold” (1981). This publishing was so controversial, because he was accused of discrediting the official version of the shipwreck, that in 1956 he was sent to Europe to work as an international correspondent for the paper. Since then, he has almost always lived abroad – in Paris, New York, Barcelona and Mexico- in a more or less compulsory exile.

   Gabriel has always been interested in politics that is why he took active political roles and founded an organization of human rights in Mexico city in 1978. He also established personal relationships with Fidel Castro and the Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos.

   Among his most famous works  we can find “Love in the Time of Cholera” (1985), a meditation of fidelity in love, “The General in his Labyrinth” (1989), a fictional account of the Latin American liberator Simon Bolívar, and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” (1981), which examines the events surrounding a murder  for honor  in a Latin American town.

    I have read some of his novels  and I find him an excellent writer. It´s easy to read, it´s captivating, and his particular style of writing makes him unique. Particularly, his novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is one of the most wonderful  books I have ever read for which I would like to recommend it to you.

IZZIE