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Having previously written shorter fiction and screenplays, García Márquez sequestered himself away in his Mexico City home for an extended period of time to complete his novel Cien años de soledad, or One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967.

The author drew international acclaim for the work, which ultimately sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. García Márquez is credited with helping introduce an array of readers to magical realism, a genre that combines more conventional storytelling forms with vivid, layered fantasy.

Whether in fiction or nonfiction, in the epic novel or the concentrated story, Márquez is now recognized in the words of Carlos Fuentes as "the most popular and perhaps the best writer in Spanish since Cervantes".

He is one of those very rare artists who succeed in chronicling not only a nation's life, culture and history, but also those of an entire continent, and a master storyteller who, as The New York Review of Books once said, "forces upon us at every page the wonder and extravagance of life."

Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1927 in the small town of Aracataca, situated in a tropical region of northern Colombia, between the mountains and the Caribbean Sea.

He grew up with his grandfather a pensioned colonel from the civil war at the beginning of the century. He went to a Jesuit college and began to read law, but his studies were soon broken off for his work as a journalist. In 1954 he was sent to Rome* on an assignment for his newspaper, and since then he has mostly lived abroad, in Paris, New York, Barcelona and Mexico, in a more or less compulsory exile. Besides his large output of fiction he has written screenplays and has continued to work as a journalist.


This beguilingly colorful saga also works out a wider social and political allegory sometimes too surreal to be plausible, at times more real than any conventional realism could afford. An exemplification of so-called magic realism, this allegorical texture incorporates a sense of the strange, fantastic, or incredible.

Perhaps the key sociopolitical example is the apparent massacre by the army of several thousand striking workers whose dead bodies seem to have been loaded into freight trains before being dumped in the sea. Against the smoke screen of the official version, the massacre becomes a nightmare lost in the fog of martial law. The disappeared’s true history takes on a reality stranger than any conventional fiction, demanding fiction for the truth to be told.

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