[8] Soon after García Márquez was born, his father became a pharmacist and moved with his wife to the nearby large port city of Barranquilla, leaving young Gabriel in Aracataca.

[12][13] Gabriel Eligio wooed Luisa with violin serenades, love poems, countless letters, and even telephone messages after her father sent her away with the intention of separating the young couple.

[32] After his graduation in 1947, García Márquez stayed in Bogotá to study law at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, but spent most of his spare time reading fiction.

After the Bogotazo riots on 9 April following the assassination of a popular leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the university closed indefinitely and his boarding house was burned.

He maintained a close but "nuanced" friendship with Fidel Castro, praising the achievements of the Cuban Revolution but criticizing aspects of governance and working to "soften [the] roughest edges" of the country.

My political ideas probably came from him to begin with because, instead of telling me fairy tales when I was young, he would regale me with horrifying accounts of the last civil war that free-thinkers and anti-clerics waged against the Conservative government.

"[44] Ending in controversy, his last domestically written editorial for El Espectador was a series of 14 news articles[38][45] in which he revealed the hidden story of how a Colombian Navy vessel's shipwreck "occurred because the boat contained a badly stowed cargo of contraband goods that broke loose on the deck.

Literary critic Bell-Villada noted, "Owing to his hands-on experiences in journalism, García Márquez is, of all the great living authors, the one who is closest to everyday reality.

[61] When the book was published in 1967, it became his most commercially successful novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad; English translation by Gregory Rabassa, 1970), selling over 50 million copies.

[61] The story chronicles several generations of the Buendía family from the time they founded the fictional South American village of Macondo, through their trials and tribulations, and instances of incest, births, and deaths.

He once remarked: "Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends, and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.

[55] The international recognition García Márquez earned with the publication of the novel led to his ability to act as a facilitator in several negotiations between the Colombian government and the guerrillas, including the former 19th of April Movement (M-19), and the current FARC and ELN organizations.

"[74] García Márquez began writing Autumn of the Patriarch (El otoño del patriarca) in 1968 and said it was finished in 1971; however, he continued to embellish the dictator novel until 1975 when it was published in Spain.

[81] Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Crónica de una muerte anunciada), which literary critic Ruben Pelayo called a combination of journalism, realism and detective story,[82] is inspired by a real-life murder that took place in Sucre, Colombia, in 1951, but García Márquez maintained that nothing of the actual events remains beyond the point of departure and the structure.

The original idea was proposed to García Márquez by the former minister for education Maruja Pachón Castro and Colombian diplomat Luis Alberto Villamizar Cárdenas, both of whom were among the many victims of Pablo Escobar's attempt to pressure the government to stop his extradition by committing a series of kidnappings, murders and terrorist actions.

[91] October 2004 brought the publication of a novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores (Memoria de mis putas tristes), a love story that follows the romance of a 90-year-old man and a child forced into prostitution.

[94] His other screenplays include the films Tiempo de morir (1966), (1985) and Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes (1988), as well as the television series Amores difíciles (1991).

[100] British director Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral) filmed Love in the Time of Cholera in Cartagena, Colombia, with the screenplay written by Ronald Harwood (The Pianist).

[106] This was disputed by Random House Mondadori editor Cristobal Pera, who stated that García Márquez was completing a new novel whose Spanish title was to be En agosto nos vemos (lit. transl.

Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos said his country was thinking of the author and said in a tweet: "All of Colombia wishes a speedy recovery to the greatest of all time: Gabriel García Márquez.

[3] The former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe Vélez said: "Master García Márquez, thanks forever, millions of people in the planet fell in love with our nation fascinated with your lines.

He said of his early works (with the exception of Leaf Storm), "Nobody Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, and Big Mama's Funeral all reflect the reality of life in Colombia and this theme determines the rational structure of the books.

He describes a trip he made with his mother back to Aracataca as a young man:[137] The train stopped at a station that had no town, and a short while later it passed the only banana plantation along the route that had its name written over the gate: Macondo.

[137]In several of García Márquez's works, including No One Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, and Leaf Storm, he referenced La Violencia (the violence), "a brutal civil war between conservatives and liberals that lasted into the 1960s, causing the deaths of several hundred thousand Colombians".

"For him, the duty of the revolutionary writer is to write well, and the ideal novel is one that moves its reader by its political and social content, and, at the same time, by its power to penetrate reality and expose its other side.

In a review of literary criticism Robert Sims notes,[144] García Márquez continues to cast a lengthy shadow in Colombia, Latin America, and the United States.

[144]Following his death, García Márquez's family made the decision to deposit his papers and some of his personal effects at The University of Texas at Austin's Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum.

The ranking is based on works translated into 10 languages, including English, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Swedish.

García Márquez is also the most translated Spanish-language author between 2000–2021 ahead of Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Roberto Bolaño, Cervantes and more.

[147] García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature on 10 December 1982 "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".