Gabriel García Márquez... still turning 80...

From the Guardian:

Hailed by a crowd of more than a thousand who gave a standing ovation, Latin America's most famous living writer, Gabriel García Márquez, clasped his hands above his head like a prizefighter as he entered the auditorium in the Colombian port town of Cartagena. During a special tribute at the International Congress of Spanish Language on Monday, the Nobel prize-winning writer, who turned 80 this month, recounted how his wife Mercedes had to hock her jewels to pay the rent and put food on the table for their two boys during the 18 months it took him to write what many consider the greatest novel in Spanish since Don Quixote - One Hundred Years of Solitude.
"To think that a million people would read something written in the solitude of my room with 28 letters of the alphabet and two fingers as my sole arsenal seems insane," García Márquez said, recalling that the novel's readers have now surpassed 50 million.

Read the whole article here.