Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel laureate writer, dies aged 87

Person close to family confirms death of author who became a standard-bearer for Latin American letters          

By Richard Lea        

theguardian.com, Thursday 17 April 2014

The Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who unleashed the worldwide boom in Spanish literature with his novel 100 Years of Solitude, has died at the age of 87, a person close to the family has said. García Márquez had been admitted to hospital in Mexico City on 3 April with pneumonia.

Matching commercial success with critical acclaim, García Márquez became a standard-bearer for Latin American letters, establishing a route for negotiations between guerillas and the Colombian government, building a friendship with Fidel Castro, and maintaining a feud with fellow literature laureate Maria Vargas Llosa that lasted more than 30 years.

He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1982, the Swedish Academy hailing fiction "in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts".