Launch of Gabriel Garcia Marquez - A Life, by Gerald Martin
21st October 2008
A new biography on Colombian Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez written by Professor Gerald Martin, Senior Research Professor in the Caribbean Studies Centre at London Metropolitan University, will be launched this month.
Gabriel García Márquez - A Life, published by Bloomsbury, London, has already received major attention across the globe. It has been signed up in the USA by renowned New York publishing house Alfred Knopf and it will also be released in translation in other countries including Spain, France, Italy and China.
In the UK a series of events will be held across the capital in venues such as the Riverside and the South Bank in conjunction with the book launch hosted by London Met on 27 October. The event will include talks by Professor Martin and Professor John King (University of Warwick) about the biography, giving staff and students an insight into the new analysis of the renowned author's life and work.
Gabriel García Márquez is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. In 1982, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has written many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best-known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). Márquez’s works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularising a literary style labelled as magical realism, which uses magical elements and events in order to explain real experiences.
Professor Martin is internationally known for his work on Latin American narrative, most notably through Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (1989) and several major contributions to the Cambridge History of Latin America. He is has become a respected authority on the fiction of both Gabriel García Márquez and Guatemalan writer (also Nobel prize-winner) Miguel Angel Asturias.
Having joined the Caribbean Studies Centre a year ago, Professor Martin is developing an interest in exploring the interface between Caribbean and Latin American literature, especially in writers such as Garcia Marquez and Asturias, whose work is embedded in their respective country’s Caribbean coastal areas, and in the Caribbean roots of magical realism.
Speaking of the book Professor Martin said: ‘It is a great relief, as well as a pleasure, to have the book completed and published at last, having started work on it as long ago as 1990. It has been a privilege to be associated with such a writer for so many years and I am proud that the first complete biography of this great Caribbean personality should have been written by someone who is not only a Briton but a Londoner.’