Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born into poverty on 6th March, 1928 in Aracataca, Colombia. He was educated at a Jesuit school in Bogotá and then at the National University of Colombia, Bogotá and at the University of Cartagena.
He became a journalist in 1947 and in 1954 moved to Europe as a reporter for El Heraldo. It was in Europe that he began writing novels, deciding, in 1965, to devote himself entirely to fiction. His most celebrated work, One Hundred Years of Solitude was first published in 1967. In this novel, influenced, as Marquez has acknowledged, by William Faulkner, the history of a family, house and town is seen through seven generations of the intermarried Buendía family who are the founders of the town, Macondo. Afterwards, many of Garcia Marquez's stories take place in the fictional town of Macondo, located in the banana-zone of Colombia, certainly based on Garcia Marquez's own village of Anacataca
1975 saw the publication of The Autumn of the Patriarch, a novel made up of a composite of three Latin American dictators.
Garcia Marquez' other major literary works include Collected Stories (1968); In Evil Hour (1968); Innocent Erendira and Other Stories (1978); the novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), a story of murder in a Latin American town; the novel Love in the time of Cholera (1988), a romantic love story; The General in His Labyrinth, (1990), a fictional account of the last days of Simón Bolívar; Of Love and Other Demons, (1994), the story of a girl who is believed to be possessed by demons; and News of a Kidnapping, (1996), a heart-wrenching book about a string of high-profile kidnappings that occurred during Colombia's war with ruthless Medellin drug lord Pablo Escobar in 1990.
He has won numerous literary awards and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.