Latin American author Gabriel Garcia Marquez passed away on Thursday April 17. Garcia Marquez was born in 1927 on the Colombian coast and was the master of a style known as magic realism, and his novels were filled with miraculous and enchanting events and characters; love and madness; wars, politics, dreams and death.

Marquez won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982. In his acceptance speech he spoke about Latin America’s wars, military coups, dictatorships and ethnocide: “We, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of … a new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.”

Chilean novelist Ariel Dorfman says the speech was one of the author’s most important messages to the world.”(in his speech) Garcia Marquez is speaking about all the people who are marginal to history, who have not had a voice.” Dorfman said.

Marquez was 87. He had learned that he had lymphatic cancer in 1999, and it is believed that he had been suffering from senile dementia since 2012.