Leaf Storm (La hojarasca) (1955)
His first novella, the first to be set in Macondo
Literature · Novelists
Gabriel García Márquez
1927–2014 · Colombian
Magic realism; Latin American Boom
Gabriel García Márquez, known as "Gabo", was a Colombian novelist and journalist and the best-known exponent of magic realism. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), the saga of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo, became a landmark of world literature. He won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature and spent much of his later life in Mexico City, where he died.
How to spot them
- ▸Macondo and the Buendía family; Colonel Aureliano Buendía facing the firing squad
- ▸Magic realism and the Latin American Boom; nickname Gabo
- ▸Born in Aracataca, Colombia, the model for Macondo
- ▸Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza wait over fifty years for love
- ▸Nobel Prize in Literature 1982; friend of Fidel Castro
Key works
No One Writes to the Colonel (1961)
A poor retired colonel waits in vain for the pension letter that never comes
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) (1967)
Seven generations of the Buendía family in Macondo, from founding to destruction
The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975)
Long-sentenced portrait of an ageless Caribbean dictator
Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981)
Reconstruction of the murder of Santiago Nasar, which the whole town knew was coming
Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)
Florentino Ariza waits more than 50 years for Fermina Daza
The General in His Labyrinth (1989)
Simón Bolívar's final journey down the Magdalena River
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1955 (newspaper); 1970 (book))
Journalism based on a Colombian Navy sailor who survived ten days adrift
Key ideas
- Magic realism: fantastic events narrated matter-of-factly within a realistic world
- Cyclical time and repeated family names in One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Latin American history, dictatorship and the banana massacre refracted through myth
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Aracataca, Colombia, and raised largely by his grandparents
- •One Hundred Years of Solitude opens with Colonel Aureliano Buendía facing a firing squad and remembering being taken to discover ice
- •Won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature; his lecture was titled The Solitude of Latin America
- •Worked for years as a journalist, including for El Espectador in Bogotá
- •Was famously punched by his fellow novelist Mario Vargas Llosa in Mexico City in 1976
- •Memoir Living to Tell the Tale (Vivir para contarla) published in 2002
- •Died in Mexico City in 2014
- •His sons published the unfinished novel Until August (En agosto nos vemos) posthumously in 2024
- •Netflix released a Spanish-language series of One Hundred Years of Solitude from 2024
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- The Nobel Prize — Gabriel García Márquez: Facts
- Gerald Martin — Gabriel García Márquez: A Life