Gabriel García Márquez

Biography

Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) was born in Aracataca, Colombia, raised by his maternal grandparents, and became a journalist before turning to fiction. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 — three years before publishing Love in the Time of Cholera. The novel was inspired directly by his parents' courtship: his father Gabriel Eligio García was a telegraph operator (like Florentino) who courted his mother Luisa Santiaga Márquez against her family's wishes (like Lorenzo Daza's opposition). His parents' love letters formed the emotional foundation of the novel. García Márquez called it 'my best novel, the one that comes closest to what I have always wanted to write.'

Gabriel García Márquez at a glance