STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- Exiled Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, banned from the United States for years because of his radical politics and friendship with Fidel Castro, Thursday won the Nobel Prize for literature.
The Royal Swedish Academy announced the award to Garcia Marquez, 54, for his works 'reflecting a continent's life and conflicts.' He is the first Colombian to win the prestigious literary award and the fourth Latin American. The prize this year is worth $157,000.
His 1967 novel, 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' -- the saga of a Latin American family in a jungle city that is eventually reclaimed by red ants -- has sold over 10 million copies in 32 languages.
But it has been his revolutionary political views, as well as an intimate friendship with the Cuban leader, that has kept Garcia Marquez barred from entering the United States except under strict guidelines issued by the State Department.
It was only through the personal intervention of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who once quoted from 'One Hundreds Years of Solitude' in a speech in Mexico City, that Garcia Marquez was issued a visa to accept an honorary degree at Columbia University in 1971.
'I was told to pick up a visa at the embassy,' Garcia Marques recalled. 'It said, 'for lecture at Columbia University.' That is now the formula. Every time I go to the United States, the fiction is that it is for a lecture at Columbia University.'
In Mexico City, where the writer lives in a huge colonial house in a wealthy neighborhod, Garcia Marquez met with reporters to talk about the Nobel award in a private library where a picture of Castro hangs on one wall.
'What is happiest is that they have given it to a Latin American, for sentimental reasons and for the possibilities that this opens for a participation in Central America.'
The writer, displaying the political beliefs that have irritated U.S. officials for years, said the United States and Honduras were preparing a 'very strong army' to invade left-leaning Nicaragua.
'If this occurs there would be a war of unpredictable proportions. We must make sure that this does not occur,' Garcia Marquez said.
The oldest of nine children born in a banana town on Colombia's Caribbean coast, Garcia Marquez has lived a nomad's life of exile since moving to Rome in 1954.
After the Cuban revolution in 1959, he helped found the Cuban news agency, Prensa Latina, and was its correspondent in Bogota and New York. He later went to Angola to study Cuba's role in Africa.
He sought asylum in Mexico last year in connection with charges he was involved in smuggling arms into Colombia.
Despite this, Colombian President Belisario Betancur praised Garcia Marquez as a man 'has always brought glory to Colombia'.
Garcia Marquez had a celebrated falling out with a leading competitor for the Nobel Prize this year, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, which resulted in the breaking of the Colombian's nose.
Press reports said Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa, two former friends, had the violent encounter in Mexico City after Garcia Marquez told Vargas Llosa's wife her husband was having an affair. Other reports said the reason for the scuffle was a political squabble.
The Swedish academy cited Garcia Marquez for his novels and short stories 'in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts.'
It also drew attention to the importance of his 'provocative' journalistic writings, which show him strongly committed to the poor.
Garcia Marquez has tasted poverty personally. When he dropped out of college to become a writer, his digusted father warned him, 'You will eat paper.'
In writing his best-selling novel, his father's warning almost came true. He locked himself up for 19 months to finish the book, pawning his car and other belongings so his family could live.
But the novel was an immediate success.
'At the age of 40, for the first time since I was born, I knew I would eat tomorrow,' he said.
He has also written 'Leaf Storm and Other Stories' (1955) and 'No One Writes to the Colonel' (1961), among others.
Garcia Marquez's new novel is a 122-page book entitled, 'Chronicle of a Death Foretold,' which will be published in April. It explores his favorite themes -- the power of fantasy in daily life, the taboos we place on reality and the ambiguity of life.
