Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel laureate writer, dies aged 87

Nobel prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez has died in Mexico aged 87, his family says.

Garcia Marquez was considered one of the greatest Spanish-language authors, best known for his masterpiece of magic realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The 1967 novel sold more than 30m copies and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

Garcia Marquez had been ill and had made few public appearances recently.

"Gabriel Garcia Marquez has died," a spokeswoman for the family, Fernanda Familiar, said on Twitter.

"Mercedes and her sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo, have authorised to give me the information. Such deep sadness," she added.

'Greatest Colombian'
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos also took to Twitter to pay tribute to the author.

"One Hundred Years of Solitude and sadness for the death of the greatest Colombian of all time," he wrote.

The cause of Garcia Marquez's death was not immediately known but he was recently hospitalised for a lung and urinary tract infection in Mexico City.

He was sent home last week but his health was said to be "very fragile" because of his age. He had lived in Mexico for more than 30 years.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's other novels include Love in the Time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold and the The General in His Labyrinth.

The vivid prose of Gabriel Garcia Marquez described a world as exotic as a Latin American carnival.

His backdrop was the poverty-stricken, and often violent world of his Colombian home where democracy never really found roots.

His stories wove imaginary magical elements into real life and were often set in a fictional village called Macondo.

A left-winger by conviction he was not slow to criticise the Colombian government and spent a great part of his life in exile.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Marquez was born in the town of Aracataca, Colombia on 6 March 1928 although his father, a pharmacist, always insisted it was 1927.

His parents moved away shortly after he was born and the young Marquez was left in the care of his maternal grandparents.

Critical acclaim

His grandfather, a veteran of Colombia's Thousand Day's War and a liberal activist, gave him an awareness of politics.

From his grandmother, Garcia Marquez learned of superstitions and folk tales. She spoke to him of dead ancestors, ghosts and spirits dancing round the house, all in a deadpan style that he would later adopt for his greatest novel.

Marquez went to a Jesuit college and began to study law, but soon broke off his studies to work as a journalist.

In 1954, he was sent to Rome on a newspaper assignment, and since that time, lived mostly abroad, in Paris, Venezuela, and finally Mexico City.

He always continued his work as a journalist, even when his fiction increased in popularity.

From the moment I wrote Leaf Storm I realised I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me”

Heavily influenced by the work of William Faulkner, Garcia Marquez wrote his first novel at the age of 23 although it took seven years to find a publisher.

Published in 1955, Leaf Storm and his three subsequent novels received critical acclaim from the literary establishment but did not reach the wide audience he would win with his later books.

In 1965, the idea for the first chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude came to him while he was driving to Acapulco.

He turned the car, drove home and locked himself into his room with six packets of cigarettes a day for company.

He emerged eighteen months later to find his family $12,000 in debt. Fortunately, he had thirteen hundred pages of phenomenal best-selling text in his hands.

The novel's first printing in Spanish sold out within a week, and during the next thirty years One Hundred Years of Solitude sold more than twenty million copies and was translated into more than thirty languages.

The New York Times called it the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.

[readon1 url="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-27073911"]Source:www.bbc.com[/readon1]