The Nobel prize Gabriel Garcia Marquez dies

R.I.P

Nobel prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez has died in Mexico aged 87, a source close to the family has said.

Garcia Marquez was considered one of the greatest Spanish-language authors, best known for his masterpiece of magic realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The 1967 novel sold more than 30m copies and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

Garcia Marquez had been ill and had made few public appearances recently.

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez March 6, 1927 – April 17, 2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in his leaving law school for a career in journalism. From early on, he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. In 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha; they have two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

He started as a journalist, and wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, such asOne Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labelled as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo (the town mainly inspired by his birthplace Aracataca), and most of them express the theme of solitude.