Gabriel García Márquez

M?rquez is probably the best-known living Colombian. Born in 1928 in Aracataca, a town in the north of the country, he studied as a lawyer but soon switched to journalism. He was sent on a writing assignment to Europe in 1955, and while there one of the Colombian newspapers for which he was writing shut down, prompting him to stay in Paris. He has since lived mostly outside his homeland in a number of different countries, including Mexico, Spain and Venezuela. His novels include One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. M?rquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.