Gabriel García Márquez

Award-winning Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez died on Thursday, April 17, 2014, in his home in Mexico City. He died of pneumonia at the age of 87, although his health had faced complications from secondary infections and age-related issues. His passing is a great loss to Colombia, to Latin America and to the world.

A famed novelist who penned a host of influential books, short stories, and non-fiction work, Gabriel García Márquez is widely regarded as one of the most influential Spanish-language writers since Miguel de Cervantes. His 1967 novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” inspired by the northern Columbian town where he grew up, earned him international acclaim and millions of readers. A subsequent novel published in 1985, “Love in the Time of Cholera,” gained even more acclaim and is featured in everything from a movie of the same name to popular culture references and literary-minded reading lists.

In 1982, García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He won the award for his novels and short stories, where he combined the worlds of fantasy and realism to create a literary movement toward ‘magical realism.’ One of the commonly-cited examples of this unconventional marriage is the physical and spiritual ascension of a character into Heaven while she’s hanging the laundry out to dry, which appears in “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” His writing style gained great critical acclaim, while simultaneously sparking debate about the literary genre of magic realism.

Gabriel García Márquez is an important writer who can’t be pigeonholed into a single category. His work in novels, short stories, and non-fiction has helped to inspire a new generation of Latin American writers, and to create a new literary genre that captures the profound and the absurd side-by-side. His novels have been adapted by filmmakers around the world, and his stories have even inspired operatic compositions. His legacy is undeniable, and one critic, Robert Sims, notes:

“García Márquez continues to cast a lengthy shadow in Colombia, Latin America, and the United States. Critical works on the 1982 Nobel laureate have reached industrial proportion and show no signs of abating. Moreover, García Márquez has galvanized Colombian literature in an unprecedented way by giving a tremendous impetus to Colombian literature. Indeed, he has become a touchstone for literature and criticism throughout the Americas as his work has created a certain attraction-repulsion among critics and writers while readers continue to devour new publications. No one can deny that García Márquez has helped rejuvenate, reformulate, and recontextualize literature and criticism in Colombia and the rest of Latin America.”

Gabriel García Márquez is survived by his wife, Mercedes Barcha Pardo, and two sons, Rodrigo García Barcha and Gonzalo García Barcha.