The vivid prose of Gabriel Garcia Marquez described a world as exotic as a Latin American carnival.
His backdrop was the poverty-stricken, and often violent world of his Colombian home where democracy never really found roots.
His stories wove imaginary magical elements into real life and were often set in a fictional village called Macondo.
A left-winger by conviction he was not slow to criticise the Colombian government and spent a great part of his life in exile.
Marquez was born in the town of Aracataca, Colombia on 6 March 1927.
Shortly after he was born, his father became a pharmacist and his parents moved away. The young Marquez was left in the care of his maternal grandparents.

Critical acclaim
His grandfather, a veteran of Colombia's Thousand Days' War（哥伦比亚千日战争） and a liberal activist, gave him an awareness of politics.

From his grandmother, Garcia Marquez learned of superstitions and folk tales. She spoke to him of dead ancestors, ghosts and spirits dancing round the house, all in a deadpan style that he would later adopt for his greatest novel.
Marquez went to a Jesuit college（耶稣会大学） and began to study law, but soon broke off his studies to work as a journalist.
In 1954, he was sent to Rome on a newspaper assignment, and since that time, lived mostly abroad, in Paris, Venezuela, and finally Mexico City.
He always continued his work as a journalist, even when his fiction increased in popularity.

Reality
Following its publication, Marquez was asked to act as a facilitator in negotiations between the Colombian government and a number of guerrilla organisations including Farc（哥伦比亚革命武装力量） and ELN（哥伦比亚民族解放军）.
He also became friends with the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, a relationship that Marquez insisted was based on books.
"Fidel is a very cultured man," he said in an interview. "When we're together we talk about literature."

In 1982 Marquez received the Nobel Prize for Literature（诺贝尔文学奖）. He received praise for the vibrancy of his prose and the rich language he used to convey his overflowing imagination.
Some saw his work as deliberate exaggeration, a supernatural, mythical approach he effected to escape the unrest of his country.
He said himself that "surrealism came from the reality of Latin America," and such works as The General in his Labyrinth（《迷宫中的将军》） and The Autumn of the Patriarch（《族长的没落》） illustrate his growing political opposition to the increasing violence in Colombia.
Garcia Marquez's place in the ranks of literary masters was further assured by the publication of another best-selling work, Love in the Time of Cholera（《爱在瘟疫蔓延时》或《霍乱时期的爱情》） in 1986.
In the story of two couples, the younger based on the love affair between his own parents.
The Mexican novelist, Carlos Macias described Marquez as perhaps the best writer in Spanish since Cervantes（塞万提斯，西班牙作家，著有《堂吉诃德》）.
"He is one of those rare artists who succeed in chronicling, not only a nation's life, culture and history, but also those of an entire continent."