His parents' stubborn courtship became Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel García Márquez (1927 to 2014), known across Latin America as Gabo, moved from journalism to novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude, which has sold more than fifty million copies. When he died, Colombia's president Juan Manuel Santos called him the greatest Colombian who ever lived.
He was born on 6 March 1927 in Aracataca, a small town in Colombia's Caribbean region. Soon afterwards his father, Gabriel Eligio García, took up pharmacy and relocated, together with Luisa, to the big port of Barranquilla, leaving the boy to be brought up by his maternal grandparents, Tranquilina Iguarán and Colonel Nicolás Márquez Mejía. At the end of 1936 he and his brother were collected by their father and taken to Sincé, and after the colonel died in March 1937 the family moved to Barranquilla again and then to Sucre, where a new pharmacy opened.
The family story itself reads like fiction. The colonel had opposed his daughter Luisa's romance, since her suitor was a Conservative with a reputation as a ladies' man. Gabriel Eligio refused to give up, sending violin serenades, poems, piles of letters and even phoned-in messages after Luisa was sent away to separate them, until her parents finally relented. Their son later reshaped that tragicomic pursuit into Love in the Time of Cholera.
Largely self-taught, García Márquez dropped out of law school for journalism and never hesitated to criticise Colombian or foreign politics. He produced acclaimed non-fiction and short stories before the novels that made him famous: No One Writes to the Colonel in 1961, One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, Chronicle of a Death Foretold in 1981 and Love in the Time of Cholera in 1985. Several are set in Macondo, a fictional village modelled mostly on Aracataca, and solitude runs through most of them. He married Mercedes Barcha Pardo in 1958, and they had two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
His signature was magic realism, in which the miraculous slips unannounced into everyday life, and his books spread the style worldwide. He received the Neustadt International Prize in 1972 and the Nobel Prize in 1982, cited for blending fantasy and realism into a rich imagined world that mirrored a continent's struggles. He was only the fourth Latin American laureate, after Gabriela Mistral, Miguel Ángel Asturias and Pablo Neruda. As of 2023 he was the most translated Spanish-language author of the twenty-first century, often mentioned alongside Jorge Luis Borges.
Source: Gabriel García Márquez
