Nobel Prize-winning Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez has died, according to reports from Reuters.
The Colombian author, who was 87 this year, had been recovering at his Mexico City home since April 8, after being hospitalized for nine days for infections in his lungs and his urinary tract.
Rumours of the writers health had sparked newspapers in Mexico to claim he was battling cancer, but a spokesperson for the family denied he was battling the disease.
The author’s was last seen in public on his birthday on March 6th, when he came out of his house to greet journalists visiting him for his birthday.
The Nobel Prize recipient, known as “Gabo,” was born in the northern Colombian town of Aracataca, the inspiration for the fictional town of Macondo, which acted as the setting of his 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.
He was awarded 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’.
Garcia Marquez, whose career spanned journalism to fantastical novels that defined the genre of magical realism.
Image via CNN