Gabriel García Márquez

García Márquez grew up in Aracataca, Colombia, raised largely by grandparents whose deadpan ghost stories and memories of the banana-company massacres became his native material. He trained as a journalist, working newsrooms in Cartagena, Barranquilla, Bogotá, and briefly Europe, a discipline that taught him to report the miraculous with a straight face.

Broke and unpublished as a novelist for years, he shut himself away for eighteen months in Mexico City in 1965, selling the family car and pawning household goods while his wife kept creditors at bay, to finish One Hundred Years of Solitude. Its success made him instantly, permanently famous and funded a lifelong friendship with Fidel Castro that drew lasting controversy.

He won the Nobel Prize in 1982 and later wrote Chronicle of a Death Foretold, reconstructing a real 1951 killing in his hometown, and Love in the Time of Cholera. He died in Mexico City in 2014.