Gabriel García Márquez biography

Born: March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, Colombia

Awards and honors: Nobel Prize for literature, 1982

Life: Studied law and journalism at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá and the University of Cartagena. He began his career as a journalist in 1948, working in Cartagena, Barranquilla and Bogotá, Colombia; Rome; Paris; and Caracas, Venezuela. Among his best-known novels are “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” and “Love in the Time of Cholera.” The fictional Colombian village of Macondo figures in much of his work, as does the combination of realism and fantasy characteristic of his style.