Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Born in Northern Colombia in 1928, Garcia Marquez started out as a journalist and became one of the finest authors of the 20^th century, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. He is most famous for his books one Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, though has written 14 fiction novels and five non-fiction works. He was exiled to Europe and Central America in 1955 after revealing the true story of a sailor whose shipwreck was used as propaganda by the Colombian government, when it had been carrying illegal cargo and crashed due to incompetence. He started out as a columnist on a newspaper, El Heraldo, and gained his first staff job at El Espectador. Garcia Marquez now lives in Mexico City.