Gabriel García Márquez was a Colombian novelist, journalist, and Nobel Prize winner who is considered one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century and the founder of magical realism. García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, and was raised by his grandparents; he was weaned on Colombia's political history and folklore, which imprinted the young boy's imagination. His grandfather, who fought in the Colombian civil wars, inspired him, besides teaching him the value of telling stories. His grandmother influenced him to develop his storytelling style, which incorporated the supernatural world with the real world, which is evident in his later stories.

Although García Márquez was a law student, his passion was in literature. His early career in journalism enabled him to write and explore the world, giving him the exposure he needed for his writing. This exposure helped him create complex works of fiction out of Latin American history, politics, and culture intertwined in his work. His most famous work is the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), which gained worldwide recognition and is considered one of the most important works of the twentieth century. The magical realism he used in writing is evident in the portrayal of Macondo's fictional town, where he mixes reality with the supernatural.

García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 for his capacity to forge the reality of a whole world while, at the same time, evoking the character of another, Latin America, and transfigure the protracted, hideous reality of man's inhumanity to man into a world of love, power, and solitude. In his lifetime, he authored many other notable books, such as Love in the Time of Cholera, published in 1985, Chronicle of a Death Foretold in 1981, and The Autumn of the Patriarch, published in 1975. He focused on people's feelings and the political situation, which made the historical and the fabulous interweave in his works.

Apart from his novels, García Márquez always considered himself a journalist, a more suitable profession. He thought that journalism was a lifeline to the real world, which in turn provided a balance to the fantasy that he wrote. In his lifetime, he developed friendships with some influential politicians, such as Fidel Castro, which enriched his work on power and revolution. The last years of his life were not easy; he suffered from illnesses, but he still wrote, and people from all over the world still read him today.

García Márquez has made a huge impact on Latin American literature and was one of the pioneers of the Latin American Boom movement. His narrative techniques have influenced generations of writers, and thus, he is revered not only in the Spanish-speaking world but in the entire world. He died in Mexico City in 2014, but his works will forever remain a testament to his writing career.