Penguin Acquires Rights To Nobel Prize Winner Gabriel García Márquez's Work In 5 More Countries

Publishing group Penguin Random House just announced they acquired the rights to Gabriel García Márquez’s work for Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela. These countries are joining Spain, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, where they already had the rights to the Nobel Prize winner’s work. “It is an honor for our publishing group to have the rights to the complete work of one of the most celebrated and influential writers of all time, Gabriel García Márquez,” said Penguin in a statement. The group highlights that some of the titles include “No One Writesto the Colonel”, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, “Love in the Time of Cholera”, “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”, amongst others.

According to the publishing group, starting on December 6, most stories, including his autobiography “Living To Tell The Tale” as well as the chronicles, “The Story Of A Shipwrecked Sailor” and “Clandestine in Chile”, will be available in most bookstores all over Colombia and Ecuador. García Márquez’s work will also be published in pocket size, hardcovers and paperbacks by the labels Literatura Random House and Debolsillo.

Until now, the rights to the Nobel Prize winner’s work were owned by publishing house Editorial Norma, which, in 2011, changed their commercial strategy and abandoned the area of fiction books to focus on school books and aim for the bigger areas, massive grocery stores and bookstores as points of sale. This was the reason the García Márquez’s books stopped selling in Colombia for the past few years, but after his death, a campaign surged on change.org to highlight the irony that the writer’s natal country was the one with least access to his books and asking Norma to go back to its former commercial strategy.

Penguin added that “Gabo’s” journalistic work such as “News of a Kidnapping”, “Costal Texts”, “Press Notes”, amongst others, will be available in 2015 in the afore mentioned countries.

“That of García Márquez will be the sole voice that will speak in Latin America through archaic coronels, races condemned, autumn lovers and whirlwinds of yellow butterflies; a pen that gets to readers from every social and cultural background, with the same impact,” concluded the publishing group.