The Colombian writer and Nobel Prize winner was born in 1928 and grew up in a poor family in the village of Aracataca. He studied law and journalism at the universities of Colombia and Bogotá.
His career as a journalist took him to Europe and North America, as well as Cuba and Mexico, and included a period of voluntary exile when his left-wing views became unacceptable in his native country. The different way of life outside Latin America sharpened his awareness of the role which myth, magic and fairytale play in the lives of Latin Americans, particularly village dwellers. He decided that "pure" realism was insufficient to convey this in his fiction and began to mix realism with elements of magic and the fantastic, in "magic realism". The style is full of strange and strong imagery, demanding thought and concentration from the reader.
He created the imaginary village of Macondo for the novella Leaf Storm in 1955 and went on to use it as the setting for other stories, most notably the novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), which tells the story of seven generations of the Buendías, the leading family of Macondo. The novel has been a great influence on novelists all over the world.
He has published several collections of short stories, starting with Leaf Storm and Other Stories in 1955 and including Big Mama's Funeral and Other Stories (1962), Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories (1972) and Twelve Wandering Tales (1992). Some short stories have themes drawn from the European fairytale tradition, e.g. The Sleeping Beauty's Plane (1982) - Innocent Eréndira is regarded by some as treating the same subject from a different perspective.
García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. More recent works include the novel Love in a Time of Cholera (1985) and the non-fiction News of a Kidnapping (1996), which deals with the Colombian cocaine cartels.
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