Gabriel Garcia Marquez dies aged 87

By Richard McColl

BOGOTA, Colombia

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia’s most internationally recognized writer, passed away in Mexico City on Thursday at the age of 87, sources close to his family told the Associated Press.

Widely recognized as one of the forefathers of magic realism, Garcia Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982.

Known for many works of literature, including One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the time of the Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, No One Writes to the Colonel and News of a Kidnapping, Garcia Marquez’s works often blended fact with fiction.

“A thousand years of loneliness and sadness at the death of the greatest Colombian of all time!” said Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos via his twitter account. “Sympathy and condolences to the family and Gaba (his wife Mercedes).”

Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1927 in the small town of Aracataca, just 56 miles south of the Caribbean city of Santa Marta and his writing and journalism were greatly influenced by his upbringing amongst the banana plantations on the Colombian coast.

The author and journalist had been in living in Mexico City, where he was resident for more than 30 years, and was admitted to hospital on March 31 in a fragile state suffering from an infection to his lungs and urinary tract. He was released from hospital care on April 8 to recover at home.

In recent years Gabo, as he is affectionately known in Colombia, had been suffering from various ailments such as lymphatic cancer and Alzheimer’s disease and, according to his brother Jaime Garcia Marquez, the author had suffered from the treatments.

One Hundred Years of Solitude which was published in 1967 went on to sell more than 30 million copies. Although Garcia Marquez originally studied law at university he started writing for newspapers on the Caribbean coast in Cartagena and Barranquilla before writing for the prestigious national daily El Espectador in Bogota.

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