Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez: Caribbean Troubadour

Abstract

Over the last twelve months, I have been working on a collection of essays and journalistic articles on the life, works, and social and cultural background of the Colombian Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel García Márquez. García Márquez was considered “the most prominent living writer in the Spanish language” (The New York Times, March 7, 2007). Over almost four decades, I have read and studied his life and works from multiple perspectives: as a regular reader, as an aspiring writer, as a journalist, as a biographer, and as a literary scholar. Between 1990 and 1997, while working as a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Universal (Cartagena de Indias), I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing García Márquez on several occasions. In 1995, I published the book Un ramo de nomeolvides (A Bouquet of Forget-me-nots), a chronicle about García Márquez’s beginnings as a writer and journalist in El Universal (1948-1950). The book included testimonies by García Márquez and his friends during the early stages of his writing career, as well as a selection of recovered texts by García Márquez, found during my research at the newspaper’s archives. In December 1997, I had the opportunity to be García Márquez´s pupil in the Workshop on Narrative Journalism offered by his foundation for the promotion of journalism (Fundación para un Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano, FNPI), in Barranquilla, Colombia. Over the last three decades, as a university professor, I have taught, researched, and written extensively about García Márquez's works. Gabriel García Márquez: Caribbean Troubadour, my first book written in English, is a contribution to the general knowledge of García Márquez in the English-speaking world, not only from the scholar’s point of view but also from the perspective of someone who shares his cultural and historical background and who has reflected about the themes and deeper structures of his work. It will be published by Lexington Book in the Spring of 2023.