“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”

Gabriel García Márquez 

Perhaps the most influential novelist ever to emerge from Latin America, Márquez was described by Juan Manuel Santos, the president of Colombia, as “the greatest Colombian who ever lived”. What’s remarkable is that he only published six novels. But what novels. In One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, Márquez helped popularise magic realism – the eruption of fantastical elements in ordinary settings. When he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, the Nobel committee wrote that he deserved the honour “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”. He died on 17 April at the age of 87.
 Gone but not forgotten