Nobel Prize-Winning Author Gabriel Garcia Márquez's Biographer-Pitt Professor Gerald Martin-Can Offer Insight on Garcia Márquez's Decision to Return to Writing

PITTSBURGH-Last year, Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Márquez announced that he would no longer write. Diagnosed with lymphoma in 1999 but now cancer free, Garcia Márquez, has changed his mind and is writing the second volume of his memoirs. University of Pittsburgh Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Languages Gerald Martin, Garcia Márquez's biographer, is available to comment on Garcia Márquez, his literary contributions, and his return to writing.

In Cartagena, Colombia, for a month-long celebration in honor of Colombian native Garcia Márquez's 80th birthday, Martin, who is working on several books about Garcia Márquez, says the writer is perhaps the best-known global literary personage since Ernest Hemingway.

Martin has been writing Garcia Márquez's biography-expected publication is sometime this year-for 16 years and is the only biographer with whom Garcia Márquez, author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (Sudamericana, 1967) for which he won the 1982 Nobel Prize, has collaborated.

A professor in Pitt's Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures in the School of Arts and Sciences whose primary research focus is 20th Century Latin American narrative, Martin is best known for his work on Garcia Márquez and author Miguel Angel Asturias. Martin's publications include "Translating Garcia Márquez or the Impossible Dream," in "Voices Over: Translating and Latin American Literature" (State University of New York Press, Albany, 2002).

###

3/14/07/tmw