Colombian · 1927–2014
Gabriel García Márquez made magical realism synonymous with Latin American fiction. The Colombian writer's 1967 masterpiece "One Hundred Years of Solitude" followed seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo, where the miraculous and mundane coexist without contradiction. The novel sold more than fifty million copies and secured his 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. García Márquez began as a journalist in Cartagena and never abandoned that training's discipline; his fantastical events unfold with reportorial precision, grounding the impossible in sensory detail.