Nobel Literature Prize Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez has passed away at his home in Mexico city shortly after midday Thursday.
The announcement of Garcia Marquez's death was made by a source close to the family and confirmed by the Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and Cristobal Pera, his former editor at Random House.
The most widely-read Spanish speaking author in the world and well-loved for iconic novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera has died at the age of 87 at his Mexico city home surrounded by his family.
Garcia Marquez, who was known affectionately by the apocope of "Gabo" in Latin America, died from lymphatic cancer; his advanced age prevented a viable treatment.
Crowds and dozens of journalists have gathered outside the house where Garcia Marquez died, some flying Colombian flags and waving his books and pictures.
Likewise, memorials have popped up in the main capitals of Latin America where mourners placed flowers and candles in front of an inmense mural bearing his likeness.
The acclaimed Colombian writer achieved worldwide fame with his 1967 novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude", which established him as a giant of 20th-century literature with more than 50 million copies sold in more than 25 languages.
"In his books the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts," the Swedish Academy said when it awarded Garcia Marquez the Nobel Prize in 1982.
Thus, the Nobel winning-author achieved literary celebrity that spawned comparisons to Mark Twain and Charles Dickens because of his most popular creations, which adds to his 1967's masterpiece, including "Autumn of the Patriarch", "Love in the Time of Cholera" and "Chronicle of a Death Foretold".
Gabo was considered the main exponent, if not the creator, of the literary genre known as magic realism, in which both the miraculous and the real converge as well as the fictional blending of the everyday with fantastical elements.
The writer's remains will be cremated in a private ceremony with no funeral in the Aztec capital, although the date has been not specify.
In his birth town of Aracataca, close to Colombia's Caribbean coast where Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1927, several events to honor him are planned as well as in Mexico and Colombia's major cities.
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Published: 4/17/2014