Gabriel García Márquez is a distinguished Colombian novelist and recipient of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. Many people know him as a writer, but during his lifetime he was a versatile and active person who was engaged not only in literature.
Biography
The full name of the writer is Gabriel José de la Concordia "Gabo" Garcia Marquez, in which the surname Garcia is taken from his father, and Marquez from his mother. He was born in 1927 in Colombia. He received education from his grandparents through his mother. At the age of 9, after the death of his grandfather, Gabriel moved to his parents.
Garcia Márquez begins his law degree at Columbia University. There he meets Mercedes Barcha Pardo, his future wife. Despite the chosen specialty, he is already beginning to make his first attempts in the direction of journalism. In the first year of university studies, he publishes his first story in the newspaper "Observer". In the 50th year, Garcia Márquez decided to leave the university and devote himself to creativity. In 1982 he became the first Colombian writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The greatest prose writer of the 20th century actively participated in the political life of his country. In 1974, he opened the newspaper Alternative, whose activities were directed against the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. At the request of the head of Mexico, he repeatedly became a mediator in negotiations between the American President Bill Clinton and Castro. And in 2006, he advocated for the complete independence of the island of Puerto Rico.
Fatal disease
In 1989, Gabriel Garcia Márquez was diagnosed with a serious illness - lung cancer, which may have been the result of an excessive addiction to cigarettes. In 1992, doctors successfully removed the tumor, and the disease receded for a while. But in 1999, the writer received another terrible diagnosis - lymphoma. The consequence was several difficult operations and long therapy.
In 2012, the famous prose writer’s brother, Haim, announced in an interview with the BBC that the writer was suffering from mental problems and therefore could no longer pursue creative activities.
The prominent Colombian passed away in 2014 in Mexico City. Until the last days of his life, his wife and children, Gonzalo and Rodrigo, were with him.
Bibliography
The writer embodied his ideas in the genre of magical realism. The first serious story "Nobody Writes to the Colonel" in 1961 at first did not become successful, because the circulation could not even be sold by half. Then comes the "Bad Hour" of 1966, and a year later there was a turning point in his career - the world admired the best-selling novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude." In 1985, the work "Love in the Time of Cholera" was born, and only this novel Garcia Márquez agreed to film in Hollywood. The film was released in 2007. Since the early 2000s, the prose writer has been engaged in autobiographical novels.
