Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014)

Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, 87, died April 17, 2014 in Mexico City. He was hospitalized in early April for an infection and dehydration.

García Márquez was one of the best-known writers in the world and a leading figure in the field of magical realism. Works of particular genre interest include collections A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings (1955), No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories (1968), Leaf Storm and Other Stories (1972), and Innocent Erendira and Other Stories (1978). Many of his stories were set in the imaginary village of Macondo, and numerous works had fantasy elements, including novels One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and The Autumn of the Patriarch (1967). García Márquez was awarded a Nobel Prize in literature in 1982 “for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts.”

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez was born March 6, 1927 in Aracataca Colombia. He attended the University of Cartagena, where he studied law, and began his writing career as a journalist for El Universal in 1948. He was a columnist and film critic, active in the thriving Colombian writing community at the time. He married Mercedes Barcha in 1958, and they traveled in the ’60s and ’70s after his writing gained success, living in Barcelona and Mexico City.

He is survived by his wife and their two sons.

See the May issue of Locus for a complete obituary.