Updated 11.15pm
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, the Colombian writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature, has died at the age of 87.
He had fallen ill last month and was treated in hospital for a lung infection. He was brought back to his home in Mexico City, where he has lived for decades, eight days ago.
A person close to his family confirmed that he died this evening.
His books, including One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, all sold massive amounts of copies in many languages, with One Hundred Years selling more than 50 million copies alone.
His magical realist novels and short stories were epic tales about love, family, dictatorship, violence and inequality in Latin America.
He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982, with the Nobel Committee citing his works “in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts”.
Additional reporting: Associated Press
Originally published 9.19pm
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