"Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 2009" by Festival Internacional de Cine en Guadalajara - Gala_Ianugural 022. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The powerful creativity of the 1982 Nobel Prize winner and his "magic realism" had its roots in his early reading of authors like Joyce, Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf, as well as Kafka, whose story of a man transformed into a giant insect was an epiphany for García Márquez: "It was not necessary to demonstrate facts: it was enough for the author to have written something for it to be true, with no proof other than the power of his talent and the authority of his voice."