Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez dies at 87
Nobel prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez died in Mexico aged 87, BBC reports. García Márquez, one of the greatest Spanish-language authors, is 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. Garcia Marquez had been ill and had made few public appearances recently. He achieved fame for pioneering magical realism, a unique blending of the marvelous and the mundane in a way that made the extraordinary seem routine. With his books, he brought Latin America's charm and teaming contradictions to life in the minds of millions of people. Born in a small town near the northern coast ofColombia on 6 March 1927, García Márquez was raised by his grandparents for the first nine years of his life and began working as a journalist while studying law in Bogotá. He wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) and 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.
