Born March 6, 1927 in the town of Aracataca, Colombia, where he lived his childhood years together with his maternal grandparents, Colonel Nicolás Márquez and Mrs. Tranquilina Iguarán; He was the first of 11 children which were born to Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiago Márquez Iguarán.
When his grandfather passed away in 1936, Márquez moved to Sucre in order to live with his parents; a short time later he moved to Barranquilla, to pursue his studies in the San Jose School and later moved to Zipaquirá, where he received his High School degree, in the National Lyceum. In 1947 he moved to Bogotá and enrolled in the National University of Colombia so he could obtain a law degree, and later cut short his studies when he decided to be a writer and pursue a career in journalism. His deep and lasting friendship with Camilo Torres dates back to those early years in Bogotá, as well as his first meeting with Fidel Castro, in 1948.
That same year, after the riots that came about due to the murder of the popular leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán – “The Bogotazo”, as such events were to be called later – Márquez left Bogotá and moved to Cartagena de las Indias and began to work as a reporter for El Universal although in 1949, only one year later, he returned to Barranquilla and took a reporting position in El Heraldo. He later returned to Bogotá in 1954, because his friend, Álvaro Mutis, asked him to collaborate in El Espectador as a reporter and film critic.
“Leaf Storm”, his first novel, was published in 1956.
As a correspondent to El Espectador, he travelled to Europe for the first time along with his friend Plinio Apuleyo and they covered East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia.
After a four year stay in Europe, he returned to South America in 1958 and decided to settle down in Venezuela. It was that the same year when he married Mercedes Barcha, in Baranquilla, Colombia with whom he had two sons: Rodrigo (Bogotá, 1959) and Gonzalo (Mexico, 1962).
In 1959, after the victory of the Cuban Revolution, he traveled to Havana at the invitation of Fidel Castro so that he could attend the human rights and war crimes trials of the people involved in the Fulgencio Batista regime and later to be employed at the government created office, Prensa Latina.
As a correspondent of this office, he established himself in New York in 1961, but a short time later he was forced to move to Mexico due to problems caused by the content of his writings. Nevertheless he kept on writing literary pieces and pursuing journalism and published his second novel, “No One Writes to The Coronel”.
In 1963 he and Carlos Fuentes collaborated on his first screenplay, “The golden rooster”, based on the story that shares the name by writer Juan Rulfo.
From 1965 to 1967 he wrote “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, his most acclaimed work. Between the years of 1967 and 1975 García Márquez was living in Barcelona and later lived in Mexico, Cartagena de las Indias, Havana and Paris for short periods, dedicating himself fully to political journalism.
In 1971 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by New York’s University of Colombia.
In 1981 he published “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”, a novel based on the crimes of Cayetano Gentile, which had occurred 29 years earlier and he was accused of being linked to the guerrilla group M-19 in Colombia, so Márquez asked for political asylum from the Mexican Embassy in Bogotá and settled in Mexico.
He was awarded the Nobel Literature Prize in 1982; On that same year the Mexican government granted him the Aztec Eagle, the most important laureate which is granted to a foreigner in Mexico, and he was a member of the jury team at the Cannes Film Festival.
In 1985 yet another of his great novels was published: “Love In the Times of Cholera”, and the publishing house Seix Barral of Barcelona edited his finished narrative. For personal reasons, in 1986 he broke his relationship with Mario Vargas Llosa.
In 1986 he founded, together with Fernando Barri, the San Antonio de los Baños Film School in Cuba and he decided to economically support the Foundation for New Latin-American Cinema. His only theater piece, “Diatribe of Love against a Seated Man”, was released in 1988, in the Teatro Cervantes of Argentina.
In 1989 he published a novelized chronicle of the last days of Simón Bolívar, titled “The General in His Labyrinth”.
In 1991 a tumor was removed from his lung and in 1999 he was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, he again settled in Mexico for his recovery; Márquez kept on writing and publishing during this period.
The creation of the New Latin-American Journalism Foundation in 1994 was another of his great projects, with the goal of fostering the professional development of young Latin American journalists, whose main projects are the Workshop of Journalism and the New Journalism Award.
In 2002 he published the first volume of his memoirs, “Living to Tell the Tale”, which was rapidly sold out in its first edition. His mother, Doña Luisa Márquez, died in Cartagena de las Indias on June 9th at the age of 97, this woman played a very important role in the development of his literary life.
“Memories of my Melancholy Whores” was the title of his following novel published in the year 2004. Marquez himself admitted he didn’t write a single line in 2005, and in 2006 2006 Gabriel García Márquez returned to Aracataca, his hometown, to celebrate his 79th birthday.
2007 was a year of big celebrations for the Colombian writer, March 6th was his 80th birthday, and his most celebrated work, “One hundred Years of Solitude” was commemorated due to having been first published 40 years earlier and he also celebrated 25 years of being a Nobel Literature Prize holder. The most important celebrations were held in Cartagena de las Indias during the Cinema and Television Festival and the IV International Summit of the Spanish language.
As part of the celebrations, the Association of Spanish language Academies published a commemorative edition of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and this year Márquez will receive homage in the International Book Fair in Guadalajara, Mexico.
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