Columbian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez (born Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez but known as “Gabo” to his fans and dubbed “Latin America’s Don Quixote” by Carlo Fuentes) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 for “his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts.” The Nobel committee was referring to Marquez’s most acclaimed novels: One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Autumn of the Patriarch, and Love in the Time of Cholera. Some of the greatest literary influences on his writing were Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and William Faulkner. Each day, Marquez would wake up before sunrise, read a book and several newspapers, and then sit down at this desk and write for four hours. And every day of their married life, that spanned more than 55 years, his wife, Mercedes, would place a yellow rose on his desk. He was often seen in public wearing a yellow rose in the lapel of his suits. When he passed away in 2014 at the age of 87, Marquez was honored with a sea of yellow roses at his memorial service held in Mexico City.
For further reading: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1982/