Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1928.

He has written a great number of books, including the masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. He now lives in Mexico City.

Márquez studied at the University of Bogotá and later worked as a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas and New York. His first full-length work, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was published in 1967 to immediate worldwide success. The book is perhaps the prime example of Márquez’s remarkable ability to present the supernatural as mundane and the mundane as supernatural. It chronicles the history of a family in the fictional town of Macondo – the loves, hates, rivalries, wars, successes and failures. The novel is an example of postmodernism, treating time with ambiguity and crossing genres and narrative styles. Salman Rushdie has described the book as “the greatest novel in any language of the last fifty years”.

Another of Márquez’s masterworks, Love in the Time of Cholera, was published to widespread acclaim in 1985. The book, a complex and compelling study of the myths we make about love, is less fantastical than One Hundred Years of Solitude but just as luminous and unique.He is the author of several novels and collections of stories, including Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Leaf Storm, No One Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories, The Autumn of the Patriach,News of a Kidnapping, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, Love in the Time of Cholera, The General in His Labyrinth, Strange Pilgrims, Of Love and Other Demons and the first first volume of his autobiography,Living to Tell the Tale. His most recent book is, Memories of my Melancholy Whores .

Many of his books are published by Penguin.

Love in the Time of Cholera is one of 25 books chosen to launch the inaugural World Book Night. 40000 copies will be given out on the 5th March 2011. Click here for more information on Love in the Time of Cholera, the other World Book Night titles, and how to get involved.