MEXICO CITY: Colombia’s Nobel-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez died on Thursday in Mexico City at the age of 87, Mexican and Colombian media reported.

Garcia Marquez, the author of “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, passed away at his home with his wife and two sons by his side, Mexico’s Televisa anchor Joaquin Lopez-Doriga said on Twitter, echoing reports in Mexican and Colombian newspapers.

Garcia Marquez crafted intoxicating fiction from the fatalism, fantasy, cruelty and heroics of the world that set his mind churning as a child growing up on Colombia’s Caribbean coast.

One of the most revered and influential writers of his generation, he brought Latin America’s charm and maddening contradictions to life in the minds of millions and became the best-known practitioner of “magical realism”, a blending of fantastic elements into portrayals of daily life that made the extraordinary seem almost routine.

Known to millions simply as “Gabo,” Garcia Marquez was widely seen as the Spanish language’s most popular writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century.

His extraordinary literary celebrity spawned comparisons with Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.—Agencies