Affectionately known as ‘Gabo’, the legendary Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez is being celebrated by Google on what would have been his 91st birthday.
Marquez in 1982 became the first Colombian and only the fourth Latin American author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In addition to his work as a novelist, Marquez was also a poet, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist.
Marquez was born in the town of Aracataca, Colombia on March 6, 1927, and grew up with his maternal grandparents. He went on to become a journalist, a profession which honed and inspired him as a writer of fiction. He began alternating between journalism and fiction in the late 1950s, a time preceded by years of political instability and civil unrest in Colombia.
He wrote his first novella ‘Leaf Storm’ in 1955 when he was 27 years old, and made his mark in the fields of poetry, short story writing and screenwriting.
At the age of 85, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, after fighting a long battle against lymphatic cancer which he contracted in 1999.
OneIndia News