Gabriel García Márquez has had three major cultural passions in an extraordinarily busy and committed career: first, his narrative fiction, the novels and short stories which are his greatest claim to fame; second, his journalism, also a lifelong endeavour; third, the cinema – writing film scripts and adaptations and participating in production – which has been another permanent obsession but whose treatment would require another book. He was also a talented poet and graphic artist in his childhood and youth, as well as an accomplished singer and dancer. Later, he even wrote a work for the theatre, Diatriba de amor contra un hombre sentado (Diatribe of Love Against a Seated Man, 1988).

Looking back, the first half of García Márquez’s career was spent in exorcising the traumas and recuperating the magic of his childhood. But the period in which he actually wrote his early works was dominated by the Violencia which followed the assassination of Liberal politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948. This tension and interplay between the personal and the political would condition García Márquez’s entire literary career; but few great writers have proved as adroit as he has in satisfying the aesthetic requirements of even the most demanding of ‘bourgeois’ critics whose normal position was that overt political commitment undermined the ‘eternal’ values of literary works.