DHAKA: Nobel prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who died on Thursday, was one of the greatest literary minds the world has produced.

Here are some facts which are probably yet to know about this author.

Marquez outsold everyone but God in Spanish
Only the Bible has sold more copies in the Spanish language than the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Emotionless Nobel Lariat
Gabriel Garcia Marquez became one of eight Latin Americans to win the Nobel Prize for literature but it freaked him out, people call which ‘emotionless’.

After getting Nobel he ran over to his friend Alvaro Mutis`s house and said “Worse, they just gave me a Nobel Prize.”

Marquez left school as other intellectuals
It is said that intellectuals always had to left regular education for causes! Gabriel Garcia Marquez also had to leave his education.

He headed out from Bogota College before completing his graduation to pursue his true passion.

He was also a Journalist
Like many great Latin American writers Marquez got his start as a journalist. But he hated tape recorders.

Marquez was buddies with Fidel Castro
Despite his criticisms of authoritarianism, the leftwing Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a personal friend of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and reported for the Cuban government`s newswire service Prensa Latina in the 1960s.

He was banned in America
The U.S. government refused to grant Gabriel Garcia Marquez a visa for more than three decades, according to The New York Times -- likely because of his support of leftwing governments opposed by Washington and his friendship with Fidel Castro.

Former President Bill Clinton overturned the restriction in the mid-1990s.

Marquez was beloved extremely by his peers
Becoming perhaps the region`s greatest exponent of "Magical Realism," a genre in which the fantastical seamlessly intertwines with the ordinary, earned Gabriel Garcia Marquez the praise of his literary peers. Chilean poet Pablo Neruda told Time Magazine that One Hundred Years of Solitude was "the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since the Don Quixote of Cervantes."

** Gabriel Garcia Marquez 5 must read
** Make him/her fall in love in 90 minutes
** Owner of a Miraculous Life

BDST: 1402 HRS, APR 18, 2014