Latin American Magical Realism

Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014), a Colombian novelist and journalist, became the writer most closely identified with magical realism, a mode in which extraordinary or fantastic events — levitations, ghosts, years-long rains, characters who never age — are narrated in the same matter-of-fact tone as ordinary occurrences, so that the marvelous and the mundane share a single plane of reality. García Márquez traced this narrative sensibility to the storytelling style of his grandmother, who recounted the most improbable events with total conviction, and to the lived reality of a Caribbean Colombia shaped by civil wars, foreign banana companies, and oral tradition. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, "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."