Dream Encounter

Wed., Oct 31

Ruben Pelayo, professor of world languages and literatures, published a biography on Nobel Prize- winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez in 2009, as well as a critical companion to the author's works in 2001.

This past summer, he was invited twice to García Márquez's home in Mexico City, where he met the world-famous author of the novels One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera in July and returned in August to join him and his wife and a few close friends for dinner. Pelayo's friend Guillermo Hernandez, who knows García Márquez, had had the author sign copies of Pelayo's books for him, and after seeing the books, "Gabo," as his closest friends know him, asked to meet Pelayo.

"It was indeed both an honor and a dream encounter," says Pelayo.  "It was a most memorable day in my life and in my professional career.  There is no wonder why he's the most loved and most popular writer in the world today."

Pelayo says that García Márquez, who is now 85, no longer receives guests other than family and friends,  and he gave gifts to Pelayo of signed special editions of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish, English and Russian. Pelayo was also given a signed parchment with the text of a talk on poetry García Márquez delivered in Stockholm the night before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1982.

Pelayo's meetings with García Márquez were his first personal encounters with the author, for whose work Pelayo has said he has had a near-lifelong passion. During his more than 15 years at Southern, Pelayo has been researching, writing, publishing and teaching about his life and works.