Gabriel García Márquez was a Colombian novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. He was loved in South America, the continent to which he gave a unique voice. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, mainly for the novel called One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Marquez is one of the best known Latin American writers of novels and short stories of all time. Ordinary readers as well as the most sophisticated critics and scholars praise his works. He creates epic, complicated plots with stories about local and family life that are full of humor, irony, drama, and comedy. The novels are mainly set in small-town Colombia, where traditional and modern practices and beliefs meet in both tragic and comic scenes.

Marquez is best known as a great writer for inventing the literary technique known as “magical realism,” where he distorts perspectives. He is able in his writing and storytelling to make the fantastical seem normal. In one scene, the hot hands of children who have lived their whole lives in the tropics, miraculously create ice. It appears completely natural in the context of the story. In another scene, a young woman’s sudden rise into heaven is considered normal in her community.

Perhaps Colombia was the perfect place for such literature to develop. As Marquez himself said, “Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.” Magical realism reflected the Colombian world that he knew, a world in which instability and revolution were always just beneath the surface.

Source: Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927 – 2014)
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