Gabriel García Márquez – Colombian novelist of the Latin American Boom; One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera; Nobel Prize in Literature, 1982. A journalist and architect of magical realism, he grew up in Aracataca with a veteran grandfather and a storyteller grandmother. He forged Macondo as Colombia’s mythic mirror, lived for decades in Mexico City, and founded a centre for Ibero-American narrative journalism.
🌱 Raised by a colonel-grandfather and a tale-spinning grandmother – the seedbed of his magical realism. 🏝️ “Macondo” came from a banana-plantation sign near Aracataca. 📰 A serialised report about a shipwrecked sailor triggered a political scandal and shaped his journalism. 🤝 Kept an unusual “editorial” friendship with Fidel Castro – swapping manuscripts and notes. 🛂 Faced US visa hurdles for years; the restriction was lifted in the mid-1990s. ✍️ Wrote One Hundred Years… in roughly 18 months of seclusion while Mercedes Barcha kept the household afloat. 🪲 Kafka’s opening line in The Metamorphosis convinced him that the fantastic could be told in a plain voice. 📝 Founded the Fundación Gabo to mentor narrative journalists across Latin America. 🎬 Co-founded Cuba’s EICTV film school and wrote for the screen. 🎙️ The non-fiction News of a Kidnapping jolted Colombia’s public debate. 🌀 The Autumn of the Patriarch experiments with oceanic paragraphs and tidal sentences. ✈️ He drafted on the move, stockpiling overheard phrases that later became character voices. 🧐 Curious: when mailing the One Hundred Years… manuscript, he could afford only half the parcel and pawned belongings to send the rest. 😄 Funny: he kept yellow flowers on his desk as a lucky charm and avoided the number 13 – a superstition he said helped him write.