Google celebrates Gabo

Search engine Google on Tuesday celebrated the 91st birthday of Columbian novelist and Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez with a doodle.

Affectionately known as Gabo throughout Latin America, Marquez is considered as one of the significant authors of the 20th century. He was also a famed short-story writer, screenwriter and a journalist.

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 for his literary contribution, especially for his short stories and novels.

The doodle highlights the magical city of Macondo which was brought to life by the author is his famous book "A Hundred Years of Solitude". The book eventually became a bestseller, with more than 30 million copies sold worldwide.

Some of his other acclaimed books are "The Autumn of the Patriarch", "Love in the Time of Cholera", and "Chronicles of a Death Foretold". His last work "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" was published in 2004.

Born in the year 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia, he has penned over 25 books, transporting readers into a world of magical realism where they find themselves in the lush, humid tropics - moldering into solitude or being slowly consumed by the throes of passion.

Marquez's keen sense of political activism and courage also allowed him to author a number of non-fictional works that eloquently document the times that he lived in, "News of a Kidnapping" being among the most famous of these.

During the Cuban Revolution, Marquez also shared a close friendship with Fidel Castro.

Marquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 1999 and died of pneumonia in April 2014 in Mexico City at the age of 87.

--IANS

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