The Associated Press is reporting that the Nobel Prize winning Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez has passed away after stint in the hospital at the end of March. He was 87.
Garcia Márquez, whose full name is Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez, was born in 1927 and raised by his grandparents as a child. His grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía was an influential community member, veteran of the Thousand Years War, and his grandmother, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, was something of a superstitious mystic. Both were avid storytellers to a young Márquez, and strongly influenced one of his most successful novels One Hundred Years of Solitude, a multi-generational saga of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo.
Family members said last week in a statement that Garcia Márquez was stable but fragile while recovering in his Mexico City home from infections in his lungs and urinary tract.
Garcia Márquez published ten books and novellas, as well as a number of short story collections and non-fiction, but didn't truly find success until One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in 1967. Another popular work, Love in the Time of Cholera, was made into a poorly received film.
Garcia Marquez, known as Gabo, popularized magic realism, and won the Nobel Prize in 1982. Colombian writer Hector Abad Faciolince said, "Being a contemporary of Gabo was like living in the time of Homer. In a mythic and poetic way, he explained our origins. His verbal imagination and creative force were astonishing.”
Since beating lymphatic cancer in 1999, questions about his health and writing have constantly swirled, and it was reported in 2012 that the author was suffering from dementia.
