When did García Márquez win the Nobel, and what was the Boom?

García Márquez wins the Nobel: the Boom

El Nobel de García Márquez y el boom latinoamericano

October 1982. In the 1960s a handful of Latin American novelists became world famous almost at once: the Argentine Julio Cortázar with Rayuela (1963), the Peruvian Mario…

Draft: not yet checked against its sources.

Where: The whole Spanish-speaking world, Río de la Plata, Colombia, Mexico City, Argentina, Peru, Chile

What happened

In the 1960s a handful of Latin American novelists became world famous almost at once: the Argentine Julio Cortázar with Rayuela (1963), the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, and the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, whose Cien años de soledad (1967), the story of the Buendía family and the town of Macondo, sold in the millions. Publishers in Barcelona and Buenos Aires, and the excitement around the Cuban Revolution, carried the 'Boom' across the world. In 1982 the Swedish Academy gave García Márquez, born in Aracataca in 1927 and living in Mexico, the Nobel Prize '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'. 'Magical realism' became the label, loved and resented, for Latin American writing.

Say it

En 1982 Gabriel García Márquez ganó el Premio Nobel de Literatura.

In 1982 Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Why it matters

The Boom made Spanish-language fiction central to world literature for the first time since Cervantes and gave readers everywhere an image of Latin America, Macondo, that Latin Americans themselves still argue with.

Read about it

• El boom latinoamericano — The Latin American Boom
• La masacre de las bananeras — The Banana Massacre

Connected

• Andrés Bello's grammar for Americans (1847)
• The Thousand Days' War and the loss of Panama (October 1899–3 November 1903)
• The Thousand Days' War and the loss of Panama (October 1899–3 November 1903)
• The Generation of '27 and Lorca (16 December 1927–August 1936)
• The Generation of '27 and Lorca (16 December 1927–August 1936)
• The banana massacre at Ciénaga (6 December 1928)
• The banana massacre at Ciénaga (6 December 1928)
• The Cuban Revolution (1 January 1959)

• Before: The dictatorship and the Madres de Plaza de Mayo
• After: Argentina's December 2001

Sources

1. Gabriel García Márquez — Facts — The Nobel Prize (nobelprize.org)