Sources from Mexico’s departments of health and culture have confirmed to CNNMéxico that Gabriel García Márquez, the 87-year-old Colombian Nobel laureate and author of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” was hospitalized in Mexico City on Thursday. Animal Politico reports that the author checked into the hospital on Thursday morning with generalized dehydration, but the root cause remains unclear; doctors at the hospital have told Mexican media sources that he may be suffering from pneumonia.
Mexican journalist and author Elena Poniatowska told the Associated Press that she had been informed of her friend’s hospitalization, but that she had not been given more details. She added that García Márquez had come to visit her at her house in November to congratulate her on the receipt of the Cervantes Prize. “He looked well,” she said. Gabo, as he is affectionately known, has resided in a neighborhood in the south of Mexico City for more than thirty years.
In 2009, García Márquez’s agent said it was unlikely that Gabo would publish a new work within his lifetime. The Guardian reported in 2012 that his younger brother told students in Cartagena, Colombia that his sibling had been “suffering the ravages” of dementia, which he said he believed had been accelerated by treatment Gabo had received for lymphatic cancer. The author’s last novel, “Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores,” was published in Spanish in 2004 and in English translation a year later.
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