One of the world’s most renowned authors, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, died of pneumonia at the age of 87 this weekend. The man was a Nobel Prize winner, a friend of statesmen, and a pioneer of magical realism in literature. Get up to speed with the man, and his impact, below.

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude

Marquez is best known for his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude. The 1967 novel sold more than 30 million copies and was translated in over 30 languages.

The book is said to be one the greatest works of all times and eventually led to his Nobel Prize in 1982. American writer and journalist William Kennedy called the book “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race”.

Although One Hundred Years of Solitude has had such a large impact on the literature world, so much so that even popular plays in Japan have been based on it; there have been no movies produced of it. Marquez never agreed to sell the rights to produce such a film.

Love in the Time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The General in His Labyrinth and No One Writes to the Colonel are his other popular works.

2. Magical realism

He achieved fame for pioneering magical realism, a unique blending of the marvellous and the mundane in a way that made the extraordinary seem routine.

With his books, he brought Latin America’s charm and teaming contradictions to life in the minds of millions of people.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. The Swedish Academy hailing fiction “in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts”.

3. Privacy

Marquez was a firm believer in privacy. Asked in 1981 about his ambitions as a writer he suggested that it would be a “catastrophe” to be awarded the Nobel prize, arguing that writers struggle with fame, which “invades your private life” and “tends to isolate you from the real world”.

“I don’t really like to say this because it never sounds sincere,” he continued, “but I would really have liked for my books to have been published after my death, so I wouldn’t have to go through all this business of fame and being a great writer.”

To read about his friendship with Fidel Castro, his diplomatic ties with the US, and his global influence, click here.

[Source : IndiaToday]