Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, has died at the age of 87 at his home in Mexico City.
Mexican authorities confirmed Garcia Marquez, who wrote One Hundred Years Of Solitude, one of the best-known and most-translated works in modern world literature, died on Thursday.
The writer's health had been deteriorating since he was hospitalised in late March for a lung infection.
Doctors allowed him to return home after eight days in hospital, but his condition remained fragile and he was undergoing oxygen therapy.
Garcia Marquez was regarded as the father of the literary style known as magical realism, as well as one of the main exponents of the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s.
Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, also a Nobel laureate, remains as the sole leading magical realist author of that generation.
Besides One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Garcia Marquez also wrote The Autumn Of The Patriarch (1975), Chronicle Of A Death Foretold (1981), Love In The Time Of Cholera (1985), and many other works.
Garcia Marquez was born in the banana-growing town of Aracataca, in the northern Colombian province of Magdalena, on March 6, 1927.
His childhood there served as inspiration for his literary works. Macondo, the fictional village where One Hundred Years Of Solitude is set, is reminiscent of Aracataca.
