CARTAGENA , Colombia, May 23 (UPI) -- The ashes of Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez were laid to rest in Cartagena, Colombia, where he began his writing career.
Garcia Marquez, author of magical realism novels including One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, died at 87 in 2014 in Mexico, where he had lived since the 1980s. He was born in Aracataca, Colombia, and began working as a journalist in the 1940s in the seaside city of Cartagena, where many of his relatives are interred.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982.
In a ceremony Sunday, his family, including son Rodrigo Barcia Barcha, and local officials unveiled a bust of Garcia Marquez at Cartagena University. Some of Marquez's cremated remains will be permanently held in a stone container beneath the bronze bust. The rest of his ashes are interred in Mexico.
Garcia Marquez, nicknamed "Gabo," studied law at Cartagena University before beginning his career as a journalist and novelist.
On Twitter, Cartagena Mayor Manuel Vicente Duque commented, "Gabo, forever in our hearts, forever in our minds, forever in our Cartagena."
The city of Cartagena figured prominently in several Marquez' novels, and was often depicted as a decadent place with a class-conscious and racist society.
