Gabriel García Márquez (6 March, 1927 – 17 April, 2014) was a famous Colombian novelist, screen writer and journalist. The author started his career as a journalist, and wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985).
Mr. García Márquez nickname was “Gabo” throughout Latin America.
His mother had 11 children and his father 15 (four out of wedlock).
He was born in Aracataca because his grandfather killed a man in a gunfight and fled to this new town, taking his daughter, García Márquez’s mother, with him.
Mr. García Márquez was a very talented artist. It is said that he was talented in several artistic disciplines including painting and singing and could have made a successful career in any of them.
He always wanted to be writer and not be in school, yet he was an exemplary student wherever he went.
When García Márquez did go to school, he traveled on a river steamer up the great Magdalena river to the capital Bogotá.
When Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, was sacked in 1948, Mr. García Márquez was there to witness the event along with his friend, Fidel Castro.
When his mother was asked about her son winning the Noble Prize she said that her greatest source of pride was “having a daughter who is a nun” and that “maybe now I’ll get my telephone fixed.”
García Márquez decided to marry his future wife, Mercedes, when she was nine. He proposed when she was fourteen. The were married when she was 26 and he was 31. They were married until he died.
Most of the author’s novels have been filmed but he has always refused to let One Hundred Years of Solitude be turned into a movie. He said: “They would cast someone like Robert Redford and most of us do not have relatives who look like Robert Redford.”
A father, husband, avid reader, blogger, software engineer & wood worker who is known the world over as a man of many interests and to his wife as “an idiot”.
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My name's Gabo and I'm just name-dropping my friend, Castro.