The first “comprehensive” biography of Nobel prize winner Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, the Colombian author of “Love in the Time of Cholera,”
went on sale in London on Monday, publishers Bloomsbury said.
British academic Gerald Martin wrote the book after 15 years of
research and interviews with at least 300 people, including the
writer’s mother, wife, children and friends, among them former Cuban
president Fidel Castro.
The publishers said Garcia Marquez, who
also wrote “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” views Martin as his
“official” biographer and they had regular conversations over the last
decade and a half.
“Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A life” will focus on
the “tension” in the 81-year-old writer’s life “between celebrity and
literary quality, between politics and writing, and between power,
solitude and love,” Bloomsbury said.
Martin, a literary critic
and Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Pittsburgh in
the United States, also spoke to writers Alvaro Mutis, Carlos Fuentes
and Mario Vargas Llosa for the book, as well as several Colombian
presidents and former Spanish prime minister Felipe Gonzalez.
Marquez won the Nobel prize for literature in 1982. (AFP)