Marquez, master of magical realism, dies at 87

Magic and reality

Garcia Marquez was one of the prime exponents of magical realism, a genre he described as embodying "myth, magic and other extraordinary phenomena."

Colombian Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez greets journalists and neighbours on his birthday outside his house in Mexico City in this March 6, 2014 file photo. Garcia Marquez, the Colombian author whose beguiling stories of love and longing brought Latin America to life for millions of readers and put magical realism on the literary map, died on April 17, 2014. He was 87. Known affectionately to friends and fans as "Gabo", he is arguably Latin America's best-known author and his books have sold in the tens of millions. [Photo/Agencies]

In photos: Life of Garcia Marquez

It was a turbulent period in much of Latin America, when chaos was often the norm and reality verged on the surreal, and magical realism struck a chord.

"In his novels and short stories we are led into this peculiar place where the miraculous and the real converge. The extravagant flight of his own fantasy combines with traditional folk tales and facts, literary allusions and tangible - at times obtrusively graphic - descriptions approaching the matter-of-factness of reportage," the Swedish Academy said when it awarded Garcia Marquez the Nobel Prize in 1982.

Although One Hundred Years of Solitude was his most popular creation, other classics from Garcia Marquez included Autumn of the Patriarch, Love in the Time of Cholera and Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

He admired Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and was also influenced by esteemed Latin American writers Juan Rulfo of Mexico and Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges.

US author William Faulkner inspired Garcia Marquez to create "the atmosphere, the decadence, the heat" of Macondo, named after a banana plantation on the outskirts of Aracataca.

"This word had attracted my attention ever since the first trips I had made with my grandfather, but I discovered only as an adult that I liked its poetic resonance," he wrote in his memoirs, Living to Tell the Tale.