Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez is being treated in hospital in Mexico City with lung and urinary tract infections which are responding to treatment, health officials and the author’s son said yesterday.

The 87-year-old Nobel laureate entered the hospital this week suffering from the infection and from dehydration, Mexico’s Secretary of Health said in a written statement.

“The patient has responded to treatment. Once he’s completed his course of anti-biotics his discharge from the hospital will be evaluated,” the statement said.

The author’s son, Gonzalo, said there had been no medical emergency and he expected his father to leave hospital early next week.

“He went to a normal room,” the son said. “He was never in the emergency room.”

Garcia Marquez has lived in Mexico City for more than three decades, and has limited his public appearances in recent years.

He was feted in front of the media on his birthday last month by friends and well-wishers who took him cake and flowers at his home in an exclusive area south of Mexico City. He did not speak at the event.

His extraordinary literary celebrity has drawn comparisons with Mark Twain and Charles Dickens

Garcia Marquez’s friend, Elena Poniatowska, a renowned Mexican journalist and author, said she last saw him in November when he visited her home with a bouquet of yellow roses, a symbol which made frequent appearances in his epic, hallucinatory novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Garcia Marquez is by many accounts the Spanish language’s most popular writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century. His extraordinary literary celebrity has drawn comparisons with Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.

One Hundred Years of Solitude has sold some 50 million copies in more than 25 languages and its 1967 publication was a milestone in a two-decades-long Latin American literature boom.

Other contemporary classics by the man with the bushy black eyebrows and white moustache, known to friends as ‘Gabo’, include Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera, The General in his Labyrinth and Autumn of the Patriarch.

Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982, and his novels have outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible. Along with writers including Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, he was also an early practitioner of literary non-fiction which became known as ‘new journalism’.

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