Gabriel García Márquez’s 24,000-page archive to be digitized

Fans of the legendary Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez will soon be able to get a closer look at the author from their computers, courtesy of the University of Texas at Austin.

The school’s Harry Ransom Center will digitize more than 24,000 pages of manuscripts, notebooks, scrapbooks, photographs and ephemera from the García Márquez archive and make them available online. The project is expected to begin in June and take 18 months to complete.

García Márquez, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982, is best known for his novels “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera.” The university purchased his personal archive months after his death in 2014 for $2.2 million.

Stephen Enniss, director of the Ransom Center, said in a news release that the project would give a wide audience access to García Márquez’s manuscripts, photographs, and more. “There are few opportunities for researchers to access digitized archives of contemporary authors,” Enniss said. “This initiative is possible due to the enthusiastic support and endorsement of García Márquez’s family.”

A few items from García Márquez’s archive at the university are already online, including a recording of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and letters he wrote to President Jimmy Carter and Salman Rushdie.

The Council on Library and Information Resources has awarded the university a $126,730 grant to digitize the author’s archive.