GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: A Life in Pictures

The Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who has died aged 87, helped to ignite the worldwide boom in Spanish literature with novels such as 100 Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. Here The Guardian celebrates his life with a selection of images charting his journey from childhood in northern Colombia to global literary titan.

And an interview with Isabel Allende where she remembers the life and legacy of late writer Gabriel García Márquez. She reads from his landmark novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and talks about how García Márquez influenced generations of thinkers and writers in Latin America and across the world. "He’s the master of masters," Allende says. "In a way, he conquered readers and conquered the world, and told the world about us, Latin Americans, and told us who we are. In his pages, we saw ourselves in a mirror." Allende describes the first time she read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and how it impacted her. "It was as if someone was telling me my own story," she says. We also air video of García Márquez in his own words and hear Democracy Now! co-host Juan González read from "The General in His Labyrinth."

DORIS LESSING DIES

Sad news today, hearing about the death of Doris Lessing. Tributes pour in for Nobel prize-winning author of over 50 novels including The Golden Notebook. Our personal homage here:

An extract of "Fable", one of her poems:

But for a while the dance went on -
That is how it seems to me now:
Slow forms moving calm through
Pools of light like gold net on the floor.
It might have gone on, dream-like, for ever.

And a short interview:

And a Guardian article:

"After 40 years of being shortlisted, Lessing at 87 was the oldest winner of the literature prize, and only the 11th female winner in its then 104-year history. What a pity, she scolded, that Virginia Woolf wasn't number four or five. The Swedish academy (which, according to Lessing, had publicly disapproved of her in the 1970s), described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". The Golden Notebook, published 45 years before, was commended as a "pioneering work" that "belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship". Read the whole article here.