Gabriel García Márquez was born on March 6, 1927. García Márquez was a Colombian novelist who was one of the wave of Latin American writers who brought new attention to the region in the 1960s and 1970s. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

García Márquez was raised until the age of ten by his grandparents, and they were important influences on his writing. His grandfather was a war hero, nationally respected for his unwillingness to remain silent in the face of the government's worst atrocities. His grandmother was a natural storyteller, and the member of the family most in touch with the family's history and its stories of relatives whose lives had been changed by mysterious omens and signs. When she told those family stories, she made no distinction between reality and the more fantastic elements.

In 1947, García Márquez began studying law in Bogota and published his first short story in one of the city's newspapers. Bogota was hit by a series of political riots in 1948, during which García Márquez's boarding house burned down. The university closed as a result of the turmoil, and García Márquez transferred to a university in Cartagena, where he began working part-time as a reporter.

He enjoyed that work and left school without completing his law degree in 1950. He moved to Barranquilla, where he wrote newspaper columns and editorials. Many prominent Colombian writers and journalists lived in Barranquilla at the time, and García Márquez became an important member of the "Barranquilla Group," whose older members introduced him to novelists and writers he had not yet read.

During his years as a journalist, García Márquez wrote a series of articles about the shipwreck of a Colombian Navy vessel. The articles drew much attention for their contradiction of the official government version of events, and for Garcia Marquez's reporting that the shipwreck was caused by the heavy weight of contraband goods on the ship. Those articles were later published in book form as The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (e-book | print).

García Márquez and his family visited the southern United States in 1961—he had wanted to see the region because of his love of Faulkner's novels—then settled in Mexico City.

In 1970, García Márquez had his first major international success with the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (e-audio | print | audio), a multigenerational family epic set in the imaginary Colombian town Macondo, which he would use as a setting for many of his books. Like much of his work, One Hundred Years of Solitude was notable for its magical realist style. As in the stories of his grandmother, fantastic or supernatural events are presented in the same matter-of-fact tone that is used for more realistic events.

García Márquez wasn't always happy with the "magical realism" label, which he thought was a way of presenting Latin American ways of thinking as exotic and unusual. If readers outside Latin American were overly fascinated by the "magical" aspects of his books, he said, "this is surely because their rationalism prevents them seeing that reality isn't limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs." His own description of his work focused on the recurring themes of solitude and loneliness, and of his characters' attempts to find connection in an isolating world.

In his next major work, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (e-book| print), García Márquez drew on his background in journalism. The novella is based on an actual murder case from 1951; he had not covered the story as a reporter, but friends of his family had been involved in the case. García Márquez presents the murder in reverse fashion; we're told at the beginning who the murderer is, then move backwards in time to discover the motives.

García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. In his acceptance speech, he talked about the challenges of being a Latin American writer, the enduring legacy of colonialism on the region, and the struggle of the region's countries to be taken seriously as entities independent of their former colonizers. That speech is included in a collection of García Márquez's speeches, I'm Not Here to Give a Speech (print).

García Márquez was not a prolific writer, and only wrote three more novels after receiving the Nobel. Love in the Time of Cholera (e-book | e-audio | print | audio) is the story of a decades-long romance between two people who are forbidden to marry by her parents; The General in His Labyrinth (e-book | print) is a fictionalized version of the last months in the life of Simon Bolivar; and Of Love and Other Demons (e-book | print) is presented as a version of a legend told to him by his grandmother, about a girl with miraculous powers.

García Márquez also produced various types of non-fiction during his post-Nobel career. News of a Kidnapping (e-book | print) reported on several kidnappings by the Medellin drug cartel in the early 1990s. Living to Tell the Tale (e-book | print) was the first volume of his autobiography, covered his life until he left law school in 1950; he had planned to cover the rest of his life in two additional volumes, but they were never written.

His last book, published in 2014, was the novella Memories of My Melancholy Whores (e-book | e-audio | print | audio), the unlikely love story of a 90-year-old former journalist and a teenage prostitute.

García Márquez died of pneumonia in Mexico City on April 17, 2014. Gerald Martin's Gabriel García Márquez: A Life (e-book | print) is a thorough biography.

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