Gabriel García Márquez
March 6, 1927 – April 17, 2014
Gabriel José García Márquez, also known as Gabo in Spanish-speaking countries, was a Colombian writer, journalist and Nobel Prize winner for literature. García Márquez popularized Magic Realism, which integrates magical elements into realistic situations. Many of his works address individual isolation as well as the isolation of Latin America.
Gabriel García Márquez was born as the son of the telegraphist, homeopath and later pharmacist Gabriel Eligio García Martínez and his wife Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán in the small northern Colombian town of Aracataca near the Caribbean coast. He was the eldest of eleven siblings, six brothers and four sisters. The second eldest brother, Luis Enrique, was born on September 8, 1928. His youngest brother (1947–2001) was Eligio Gabriel Garcia Márquez and also became a writer.
There have been various references to Gabriel García's year of birth in the literature. Some sources incorrectly gave 1928 as the year of birth; in his autobiography he himself mentions the year 1927. In January 1929, the family moved to the Sucre Department, while he himself grew up in Aracataca with his maternal grandparents, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cortés and Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía, a veteran of the Thousand Day War. When his grandfather died in 1936, Gabriel had to return to his parents in Sucre.
At the age of twelve, García Márquez received a scholarship that enabled him to attend the Jesuit College in Zipaquirá, 30 km north of Bogotá. In 1946, in accordance with his parents' wishes, he began studying law at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá. It was also at this time that García Márquez met Mercedes Barcha Pardo, his future wife, who died in August 2020 at the age of 87. Bored with law school, which he finally gave up in 1950, García Márquez began to study poetry and literature (especially the works of Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner).
From 1954 he worked for the newspaper El Espectador, where he first wrote short stories and film reviews, and later also for El Universal and El Tiempo. In the following years, his work as a journalist took him to Rome, Geneva, Poland, Hungary, Paris, Barcelona, Mexico, Caracas and New York, where his first son Rodrigo was born in 1959.
In the same year, he was asked by Fidel Castro to write a book about his victorious revolution and became a good friend of Castro. García Márquez also often stayed in Cuba later on. This friendship was repeatedly criticized: it led to the rupture of his long-standing literary friendship with the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who had described him as Castro's courtier ("cortesano de Castro") in a speech at the P.E.N. Congress in 1986, and Susan Sontag demanded in vain in 2003 that García Márquez join the protest against a "wave of repression" in Cuba. García Márquez was an avowed socialist.Gabriel García Márquez wrote screenplays, columns, reports, short stories, stories, novels and memoirs. With the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude ("Cien años de soledad"), set in Colombia, which sold more than 30 million copies, he made his breakthrough as a writer in 1967. In 1972 he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In 1982, García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature – for his works "in which the fantastic and the realistic [...] that reflect the life and conflict of a continent". He invested the prize money of the Nobel Prize in the founding of the daily newspaper El Otro; In 1998 he became co-owner of the magazine Cambio.
García Márquez was very active politically, which becomes clear in his books: The adventure of Miguel Littín describes the repression that the people had to suffer under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. News of a kidnapping is about the kidnapping of civilians by the Colombian drug mafia.
In addition to articles, he was also involved in political matters with public speeches, such as on August 6, 1986 at the Conferencia de Ixtapa in Mexico on the anniversary of the first atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In the same year, several thousand copies of the book The Adventure of Miguel Littín were burned in Valparaíso (Chile) for political reasons. For political reasons, García Márquez did not converse in English. In 1999, García Márquez fell ill with cancer and underwent chemotherapy. Later he suffered from dementia. He died on April 17, 2014 at the age of 87 in Mexico City, where he had lived most of the time. Both the President of Colombia and the President of Mexico spoke at his funeral service. The heirs sold his estate to the University of Texas. Since November 2015, it has been open to literary scholars. After his cremation, part of his ashes were buried on May 22, 2016 in the Claustro de la Merced in Cartagena de Indias, while some remained in Mexico.