Who wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude?

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, published in 1967, written in eighteen months during which he sold the car, pawned his wife's hairdryer and jewellery, and ran up debts with the butcher and the landlord. When it was finished he could not afford to post the whole manuscript to the publisher in Buenos Aires and sent half, then the rest when more money came in.

He always insisted the magical realism was not invention. He said he was writing the way his grandmother told stories - relating impossible things with a completely straight face and absolute conviction, so that a woman ascending to heaven while folding sheets is reported in the same tone as the weather. The Colombia he grew up in also supplied material that needs no exaggeration: the banana plantation massacre in the novel happened, and the official number of dead remains disputed.

The book sold tens of millions and made him the most famous writer in Latin America, which brought a political weight he did not put down. He was close to Fidel Castro, which cost him friendships and, for years, a US visa, and he used the access to negotiate quietly in several hostage cases. His Nobel lecture in 1982 was about Europeans finding Latin American reality implausible while accepting their own history as normal.