The project was carried out by the Harry Ransom Center, the literary documentation service at the University of Texas, Austin.
The U.S. university has made over 27,000 images from the late Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s archive available online. The images include materials from all of his works of fiction, personal scrapbooks, a memoir, screenplays and photographs.
Best known for his novel “Love in the Time of Cholera,” Garcia Marquez was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, considered by many to be one of the most significant Spanish language authors of the 20th century. In 1972 he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.
It purchased the archives for $2.2 million in November 2014, a few months after the death of the Colombian novelist known for works such as “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. Part of the archive has never been published, such as a 32-page text for the second volume of Garcia Marquez’s memoirs, which never saw the light of day.
“My mother, my brother and I were always committed to having my father’s archive reach the broadest possible audience,” Rodrigo Garcia, one of the author’s sons, said in a statement released Tuesday. “This project makes my father’s work more widely accessible to a global community of students and scholars.”
“Spanning more than a half century, the contents reflect Garcia Marquez’s energy and discipline and reveal an intimate view of his work, family, friendships and politics,” said Jullianne Ballou, the librarian who oversaw the 18-month project. It covers about half of the Garcia Marquez personal archive. For now there are no plans to digitize the other half, the university told AFP.
