Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez (Gabo)

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014), affectionately known across the Spanish-speaking world as *Gabo*, was raised in the Caribbean banana-zone town of Aracataca by his maternal grandparents. His grandfather, a retired colonel of the Thousand Days War, told him true stories of war and massacres, while his grandmother told him ghost stories with an absolute deadpan, poker face—the storytelling secret that birthed *Magical Realism*.

Working as a penniless investigative journalist in Mexico City in 1965, Gabo pawned his family car and his wife Mercedes Barcha pawned her hair dryer and jewelry to pay the postal postage to send the manuscript of Cien años de soledad to a publisher in Buenos Aires. Published in 1967, the novel opening with Colonel Aureliano Buendía facing the firing squad and remembering the afternoon his father took him to discover ice, sold over fifty million copies in forty-six languages, earning him the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.