Who was Gabriel Garcia Marquez?

Today’s Google Doodle is honouring acclaimed Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez on what would have been his 91st birthday. The Economic Times calls him “one of the greatest writers of the Spanish language”.

Once affectionately dubbed "the greatest Colombian who ever lived", Marquez is most well known for his work in the genre of magical realism, in which “the mundane and the fantastic occur with equal plausibility”, says Time magazine.

Marquez was born in Aractaca in Colombia on March 6, 1927. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, to whom he attributed his gift of storytelling and fascination with the supernatural.

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After 18 months of writing, Marquez published a novel inspired by his grandparents’ home where he grew up, A Hundred Years of Solitude. The book quickly became a bestseller, selling more than 30 million copies world-wide.

Today’s Google Doodle depicts the lush forests of the Amazonian jungle and the magical city of Macondo from A Hundred Years of Solitude. The Doodle contains details from Marquez’s novel including the city of mirrors and golden fish.

“We have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable,” he said in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature he won in 1982.

Throughout his career, Marquez at least 25 books including The Autumn of the Patriarch and Love in the Time of Cholera.

Garcia Marquez died in his home in Mexico in 2014 at the age of 87.