Renowed Colombian Author Gabriel Garcia Marquez Celebrates His 86th Birthday

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the most celebrated names in Latin American Literature, is celebrating his 86th birthday today.

The Colombian writer and journalist was born March 6, 1927 in Aracataca, Department of Magdalena, Colombia. There, he lived with his grandfather, Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía, a retired colonel from the the civil war and one of the biggest influences in the writer's life, according to the website Centro Virtual Cervantez.

During college, Garcia Marquez studied law, but then decided to pursue a career in journalism after meeting the journalist Clemente Manuel Zabala, who became his mentor.

"El Gabo," how he has been affectionately nicknamed, worked as a journalist in "El Universal" and other publications until the age of 28, when he decided to become an author. He released his first short novel, La Hojarasca, where he fist mentions the town of Macondo, the imaginary place based on his hometown that appears in many more of his stories, added the website.

In 1955, at the age of 40, he wrote what is considered to be a masterpiece of Latin American and universal literature, Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude). The book has been translated into a large number of languages and has sold millions of copies worldwide.

Throughout the years, he wrote other renowned novels including Crónica de Una Muerte Anunciada (Chronicles of a Death Fortold) and El Amor en Los Tiempos del Cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera). These works of art helped the author develop his acclaimed literary style known as magic realism, style for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.

The award was given to the Colombian novelist "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts," it was noted on Nobelprize.org.

Most recently, Garcia Marquez wrote Vivir Para Contarla (Living to Tell the Tale) in 2002 - about his life from 1927 to 1950 -- and Memorias de Mis Putas Tristes (Memories of My Melancholy Whores) in 2004, which was made into a film and released in 2011.

According to El Pais, his birth town of Aracataca will celebrate the novelist's birthday today by screening movies based on his works at the Casa Museo, the museum located where he once lived. The venue will also host readings of Cien Años de Soledad in Spanish and French, and the town will hold a mass to pray for the celebrated writer's health.