Gabriel García Márquez (1928[1] - 17 April 2014) was a Colombian author and Nobel Prize winner, well known for his novels in the magical realist style. García Márquez was born in Aracataca, in the Magdalena Department of Colombia. He was raised by his mother's father, Colonel Nicolás Márquez. He attended the National University in Bogota and the University of Cartagena, after graduation, he worked as a reporter in Colombia and abroad for various Colombian newspapers until 1955, when El Espectador, for which García Márquez was a correspondent based in Europe, was closed down by Rojas Pinilla, Colombia's dictator.
García Márquez published his first book of short stories, La hojarasca (Leaf Storm), that year. His first novel, El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (Nobody writes to the Colonel) was published in 1961. He has published numerous other works since then, most prominently Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) in 1967, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. He continued to write in the style and of the places of his earlier works, until his death in 2014.