Sunday, January 10, 2016

Biography of Gabriel García Márquez, by Maria Lluïsa Iborra






Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez – Gabriel García Márquez, was born on March 6, 1927 in Aracatana (Colombia)


His parents were Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez.
He was raised by his grandparents ; the colonel Nicolas Márquez and Tranquilina Iguaran; they were his first influence on his writings.

In 1936, when his granfather died, Gabriel moved to his parents' house in Sucre and he studied at a boarding school in Barranquilla.

From 1940 he studied at San José school where he wrote his first romances for the school journal.

After his graduation, in 1947, he lived in Bogotá for studying Law at the National University of Colombia. In 1947, he published his first short story La tercera resignación in the newspaper El Espectador.

In 1948 Gabriel gave up law studies and started to work as a reporter and writer.
He married Mercedes Barcha in 1958 and they had two sons: the oldest one, Rodrigo, was born in 1959; and the youngest one, Gonzalo, was born in 1962. Rodrigo is a movie director and Gonzalo is a graphic designer.

García Márquez is best known for his novels, such as Cien años de soledad (1967), El otoño del patriarca (1975) and El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985). Most of his books are based or set in his birth place, Aracataca. He mostly wrote books about realism or magical realism. His themes included solitude and violence.

In 1982, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts".

García Márquez was appointed mediator at the talks for peace between the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) and the Colombien government in Cuba, and between the “Belisario Betancourt” government and the group Movimiento 19 de Abril (M-19).

García Márquez wrote his last book in 2004. He retired in May 2008 because of his age and health.

In April, 2014 García Márquez was internee in the Instituto de Ciencias Médicas y Nutrición in Mexico DF, for the relapse of the lymphatic cancer diagnosed in 1999.

Gabriel García Márquez died in Mexico DF, on April 17, 2014.

The President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, said about García Márquez: “The writer was the Colombian who put further and higher the name of our land in all the history of our country".









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