Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez died at 87

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel laureate in literature died at the age of 87 in Mexico on 17 April 2014. He was considered the most popular Spanish-language writer after Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th Century.

He was born in Colombia in 1927 and received the Nobel Prize in 1982 for literature. His novels and short stories were about Latin America’s passion, superstition, violence and inequality.

He was an elder statesman of Latin American journalism, with magisterial works of narrative non-fiction that included the Story of A Shipwrecked Sailor, the tale of a seaman lost on a life raft for 10 days.

His stories made him the best-known practitioner of magical realism and the fictional blending of the everyday with fantastical elements in literature such as a boy born with a pig's tail and a man trailed by a cloud of yellow butterflies.

His first and epic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in 1967 which earned him accolades around the world. The novel was translated into 25 languages and around 50 million copies of the novel were sold.    

His other books include Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), The General in his Labyrinth (1989), Of Love and Other Demons (1994) and Living to Tell the Tale (2002).