Gabriel García Márquez

Marriage and family

Other works

Gabriel García Márquez with his son, Gonzalo, and his wife

• García Márquez met Mercedes Barcha while she was at school; they decided to wait for her to finish before getting married.
• When he was sent to Europe as a foreign correspondent, Mercedes waited for him to return to Barranquilla.
• Finally they married in 1958.
• The following year, their first son, Rodrigo García, now a television and film director, was born.
• In 1961, the family traveled by Greyhound bus throughout the southern United States and eventually settled in Mexico City. García Márquez had always wanted to see the Southern United States because it inspired the writings of William Faulkner.
• Three years later the couple's second son, Gonzalo, was born in Mexico.
• Gonzalo is currently a graphic designer in Mexico City.

Novels:

• In Evil Hour (1962)
• The General in His Labyrinth (1989)
• Of Love and Other Demons (1994)

Novellas:

• Leaf Storm (1955)
• No One Writes to the Colonel (1961)
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981)
• Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004)

Short story collections:

• Eyes of a Blue Dog (1947)
• Big Mama's Funeral (1962)
• One of These Days (1962)

Non-fiction:

• The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1970)
• The Solitude of Latin America (1982)
• The Fragrance of Guava (1982)
• Clandestine in Chile (1986)
• News of a Kidnapping (1996)
• A Country for Children (1998)
• Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

Death

Gabriel García Márquez

In 1999, García Márquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. Chemotherapy provided by a hospital in Los Angeles proved to be successful, and the illness went into remission.

García Márquez died of pneumonia at the age of 87 on 17 April 2014 in Mexico City. His death was confirmed by his relative Fernanda Familiar on Twitter, and by his former editor Cristóbal Pera.

The Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos mentioned: "One Hundred Years of Solitude and sadness for the death of the greatest Colombian of all time".The former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe Vélez said: "Master García Márquez, thanks forever, millions of people in the planet fell in love with our nation fascinated with your lines".At the time of his death, he had a wife and two sons.

Prizes

Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century and one of the best in the Spanish language, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

He received the Nobel Prize in Literature on 8 December 1982 "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts". His acceptance speech was entitled "The Solitude of Latin America". García Márquez was the first Colombian and fourth Latin American who won a Nobel Prize for Literature. After becoming a Nobel laureate, García Márquez stated to a correspondent: "I have the impression that in giving me the prize, they have taken into account the literature of the sub-continent and have awarded me as a way of awarding all of this literature".

Garcia Marquez won the Nobel prize in 1982

Themes

• García Márquez was also noted for leaving out seemingly important details and events so the reader is forced into a more participatory role in the story development.
• Reality is an important theme in all of García Márquez's works. He said of his early works (with the exception of Leaf Storm), "Nobody Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, and Big Mama's Funeral all reflect the reality of life in Colombia and this theme determines the rational structure of the books. I don't regret having written them, but they belong to a kind of premeditated literature that offers too static and exclusive a vision of reality."
• The theme of solitude runs through much of García Márquez's works. As Pelayo notes, "Love in the Time of Cholera, like all of Gabriel García Márquez's work, explores the solitude of the individual and of humankind...portrayed through the solitude of love and of being in love".
• García Márquez noted:,,In every book I try to make a different path [...]. One doesn't choose the style. You can investigate and try to discover what the best style would be for a theme. But the style is determined by the subject, by the mood of the times. If you try to use something that is not suitable, it just won't work. Then the critics build theories around that and they see things I hadn't seen. I only respond to our way of life, the life of the Caribbean. “

Who was he?

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez, who was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo or Gabito throughout Latin America, was born on 6 March 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia.

Works and style

García Márquez started as a journalist, and wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), and Love in the Time of Cholera(1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo (the town mainly inspired by his birthplace Aracataca), and most of them explore the theme of solitude.