Gabriel García Márquez

Born 6 March 1927 in Colombia, Gabriel José García Márquez left law school for journalism and spent years sharpening his eye in newsrooms, never shy about skewering politics at home or abroad. In 1967 he published One Hundred Years of Solitude, a multi-generation saga set in the fictional village of Macondo that has since sold over fifty million copies and made magic realism a living tradition. The novels that followed — Chronicle of a Death Foretold in 1981, Love in the Time of Cholera in 1985 — cemented him as the most-translated Spanish-language author alive. In 1982 he won the Nobel Prize…