Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez dies at 87
Garcia Marquez had been ill and had made few public appearances recently. AP / Getty Images Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, has died. Garcia Marquez was considered one of the greatest Spanish-language authors, best known for his masterpiece of magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude. The 1967 novel sold more than 30 million copies and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who was praised as the most popular Spanish-language writer since Cervantes, died Thursday in Mexico City at the age of 87.
The Mexican government said Garcia Marquez died at 2pm (1900 GMT) on Thursday. A gray hearse escorted by dozens of police officers in patrol cars and on motorcycles left the author\’s home about three hours later.
Widely considered the most popular Spanish-language writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century, García Márquez achieved literary celebrity that spawned comparisons to Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.
His fictional works outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible. The epic 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude sold more than 50 million copies in more than 25 languages.
García Márquez, a native of Colombia, is widely credited with helping to popularize "magic realism," a genre that blends the everyday with fantastical elements.
García Márquez won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982 for his novels and short stories. When he won the award, he called Latin America a "source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty."
Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, a small town near Colombia\’s Caribbean coast, on March 6, 1927. He was the eldest of the 11 children of Luisa Santiaga Marquez and Gabriel Elijio Garcia, a telegraphist and a wandering homeopathic pharmacist.
He is survived by his wife and two sons.
Source: Agencies
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