Gabriel Garcia Marquez
©Jose Lara; via Wikimedia Commons

Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez was hospitalized in Mexico City last week, the Associated Press reports (via NPR). The writer’s son Gonzalo released a statement, in conjunction with the Secretary of Health for Mexico, saying that his father was responding well to treatment and that this was not a medical emergency.

The Colombian novelist was admitted to the hospital with lung and urinary tract infections, as well as dehydration. His son pointed out that “he went to a normal room,” not the emergency room. Renowned journalist/author Elena Poniatowska, a friend of Garcia Marquez’s, last saw the 87-year-old when he visited her in November with a bouquet of yellow roses (a nod to his own novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude) and says that “he looked well” at the time. An anonymous source close to the family tells the AP that despite his rumored memory loss and infrequent public appearances in recent years, Garcia Marquez is able to carry on a normal day-to-day life.

Garcia Marquez is best known for his seminal One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, and was presented the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 for his novels and short stories. He is, as the AP article points out, arguably the most popular Spanish-language writer since Miguel de Cervantes, with his books outselling everything else published in Spanish except The Bible.

Garcia Marquez’s son expects that he’ll be out of the hospital early this week.