The 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts.

He is one of the foremost interpreters of magical realism in literature, a genre in which the framework narrative is set in a real place and time, but supernatural and dreamlike elements are part of the portrayal.

The novels El otoño del patriarca ("The Autumn of the Patriarch", 1975), Crónica de una muerte anunciada ("Chronicle of a Death Foretold", 1981) and El amor en los tiempos del colera ("Love in the Time of Cholera", 1985) cemented his position as one of the greatest Latin American writers of all time.

He spoke of García Márquez as a "rare storyteller richly endowed with a material, from imagination and experience, which seems inexhaustible" and his importance in bringing attention to Latin American literature.

"The great novels remind one of William Faulkner", Gyllensten said, "With his stories García Márquez has created a world of his own which is a microcosmos.