Bogota (Columbia): Fans of Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, renowned for his classic One Hundred Years of Solitude, marked his 80th birthday on Tuesday with readings and celebrations from Spain to South America.
Eighty cannon shots rang out in the writer's childhood Caribbean hometown while Spanish politicians, artists and journalists held a marathon reading of his most famous novel in Madrid.
Garcia Marquez, famous for the magic realism style of his books, is one of Latin America's most popular figures and is fondly known as just "Gabo" in Colombia.
The writer has lived for years in Mexico but did not appear in public on Tuesday. He has said he hates television and public spectacles.
This year is one of several anniversaries for the former encyclopedia salesman turned Nobel laureate - 25 years since he received the Nobel literature prize and 40 years since he published One Hundred Years of Solitude, which sold more than 30 million copies worldwide.
"Your transcendent literary work, your exemplary life and efforts for a more just society, allow us to say with conviction your are the teacher of teachers," Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe said in a letter to the author.
Colombia's culture minister said the government planned to restore Garcia's childhood home in Aracataca, the town in a steamy banana-growing region where the writer first heard the folk tales from his grandmother that helped shape his novels.
Born in 1927, Garcia Marquez began studying law and was briefly a salesman, but then turned to journalism working for local newspapers in the Caribbean city of Cartagena and the capital Bogota.
He won the Nobel prize in 1982. Among his other noted works are Love in the Time of Cholera and The General in His Labyrinth, which reconstructs the life of South American liberation hero Simon Bolivar.
The writer and journalist has not escaped Colombia's tumultuous politics during his eight decades.
During the 1980s, he went into exile in Mexico after he was accused of links with the M-19 guerrilla movement and later he helped negotiate talks with the country's largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
Garcia Marquez is one of the few top Latin American intellectuals who have stood by Cuba due to his close friendship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who is also 80. Cuba's Communist Party newspaper Granma praised the writer on Tuesday "for his unconditional solidarity, his comings and goings and, above all, his deep friendship with Fidel."
The writer has a large house in an area of Havana where the wealthiest Cubans lived before Castro's 1959 revolution, and he religiously returns once a year to teach script writing at an international film school he started in Cuba 20 years ago.
"I fostered the creation of the film school because I can't teach how to write literature," Garcia Marquez said in a recent publication by the school.
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