Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia. After studying law and journalism at the National University of Colombia in Bogota, he became a journalist. In 1965, he left journalism, to devote himself to writing. Acclaimed for both his craft and his imagination, he has been called a master of myth and magical realism (a style of literature that makes use of fantastical, highly improbable, and sometimes supernatural events and characters). In his novels and stories he has created a fictional world out of his memories of the dust, rain, and boredom of life in an isolated Colombian community. His stories depict a world shaped by myth, history, politics, and nature. Garcia Marquez first created Macondo, his fictional town, in his short story collections Leaf Storm (1955) and No One Writes to the Colonel (1961), but it was the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) that brought both Macondo and Garcia Marquez to world attention. One Hundred Years of Solitude traces a century in the town's history, from its founding through its destruction by a cyclone. Skillfully blending the fantastic, the mythical, and the commonplace in a humorous and powerful narrative, Garcia Marquez tells a moving tale of people locked in an isolation, partly of their own making and partly due to U.S. and European cultural and political domination of Latin America. With this work, Garcia Marquez established himself internationally as a major novelist, and his reputation has continued to grow since he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982.
Gabriel García Márquez, nacido en Colombia, es una de las figuras más importantes e influyentes de la literatura universal. Ganador del Premio Nobel de Literatura en 1982, es además cuentista, ensayista, crítico cinematográfico, autor de guiones y, sobre todo, un intelectual comprometido con los grandes problemas de nuestro tiempo, y en primer término con los que afectan a su amada Colombia y a Hispanoamérica en general. Máxima figura del llamado «realismo mágico», en el que historia e imaginación tejen el tapiz de una literatura viva, que respira por todos sus poros, es en definitiva el hacedor de uno de los mundos narrativos más densos de significados que ha dado la lengua española en el siglo XX. Entre sus novelas más importantes figuran Cien años de soledad, El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, Crónica de una muerte anunciada, La mala hora, El general en su laberinto, el libro de relatos Doce cuentos peregrinos, El amor en los tiempos del cólera y Diatriba de amor contra un hombre sentado. En el año 2002 publicó la primera parte de su autobiografía, Vivir para contarla.
