Vale: Gabriel García Márquez.

One Hundred Years of Solitude wasn't the first magic realist book I'd ever read, but it was the first time I was aware I was reading that genre. The book was set as part of my university course, and while reading it I realised I'd encountered magic realism before - I simply hadn't known it.

I've since managed to read a few of Márquez's short stories, in anthologies such as Black Water 2, and although I've picked up a couple of other novels by Gabriel García Márquez, most notably Love in a Time of Cholera, I must admit  to not having read them yet. They're still in the TBR pile.

But magic realism is a genre I've fallen in love with, from the great South American movement through to writers like Haruki Murakami, Jonathan Carroll and Tea Obrecht, and it appears as though these writers owe a debt of gratitude to the South American movement that seemed to be spearheaded by Gabriel García Márquez.

He was 87.