Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) was born in Aracataca, Colombia. He went to school in Bogotá before attending the Universidad Nacional de Colombia to study law. It was during this time that he began an earnest interest in writing. Eventually, however, political strife in Bogotá forced his transfer to the university in Cartagena, where he began his work in journalism that would eventually lead him back to Bogotá and working for El Espectador. In 1955, at the time of writing the series of articles that would comprise The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor two decades later, the 27-year-old Marquez was relatively unknown; it was Velasco’s story that launched Marquez’s writing career and clinched his journalistic authority.

Márquez later became a renowned novelist with works such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). Márquez was politically active most of his life and was able to use his literary fame to facilitate negotiations between the Colombian government and the guerrillas of the M-19 movement. His writing is known for incorporating a mixture of realism and magical realism, and solitude and violence (in the form of civil strife) are among his major recurrent themes.