The literary giant, considered to be one of the greatest Spanish-language authors of all time, had spent nine days in hospital with a lung and urinary tract infection this month.
The Colombian author was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer about 12 years ago and battled it successfully before being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2006.
He was admitted into hospital for an infection, dehydration and pneumonia. His death was confirmed by two people close to the family who spoke on condition of anonymity out of respect for the privacy of his wife, Mercedes and two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
Reports in a Mexican newspaper this month that the cancer had returned and spread to his lungs, lymph nodes and liver were publicly denied by Colombian President Juan Manual Santos.
The 1967 novel One Hundred Years Of Solitude remains his best known work, selling 50 million copies in more than 25 languages. In a career spanning more than 60 years his books – among them Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera and Autumn of the Patriarch – outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible.
The author, whose career spanned journalism and fantastical novels said to have defined and popularised the genre of magic realism, has made few public appearances in recent years.
Known to his friends as Gabo, he was highly political and campaigned for Latin American unity and an end to American meddling in the region. Born in the small Colombian town of Aracataca, he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982 “for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts,” according to the Nobel Prize website.
In 1981 he was asked about his ambitions as a writer he suggested that it would be a “catastrophe” to be awarded the Nobel prize, arguing that writers struggle with fame, which “invades your private life” and “tends to isolate you from the real world”.
WORLD REACTS TO DEATH OF GABO:
“With the passing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the world has lost one of its greatest visionary writers”, Barack Obama
“I was honored to be his friend and to know his great heart and brilliant mind for more than 20 years”, Bill Clinton
“His unique characters and exuberant Latin America will remain marked in the hearts and memories of his millions of readers,” Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.
