Mexico and Colombia have held public memorial ceremonies for the late Nobel award-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Mexico bid farewell to its late artistic icon "Gabo" (Marquez’s nickname) during a ceremony held on Monday, April 21. Many people gathered in Mexico’s Fine Arts Palace where in a national tribute filled with roses and the late Nobel winner's favorite classical music performed by his favorite composers. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos was heading to Mexico to take part in the ceremony alongside Mexican leader Enrique Pena Nieto. His native Colombia also holds its own commemoration at Bogota's cathedral on Tuesday for the man Santos hailed as "the greatest Colombian of all time." Colombians are planning to hold reading programs of Garcia Marquez's novel No One Writes to the Colonel in more than 1000 libraries, parks and universities on Wednesday. The Colombian Nobel literature laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez passed away at the age of 87 at his home in Mexico City on April 17, 2014. Garcia Marquez, known by his nickname "Gabo" throughout Latin America, was a journalist, novelist, screenwriter, playwright and memoirist. The author, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, is known for bringing Latin American literature to a global audience in the second half of the 20th century together with famed author Carlos Fuentes. The works of the founder of magical realism include his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude as well as Love in the Time of Cholera and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. He was considered the finest writer of the Spanish language since Cervantes. "We're left with the memories and the admiration to all Colombians and also Mexicans, because I think Gabo was half Mexican and half Colombian. He's just as admired in Mexico as he is in (his native) Colombia, all of Latin America and throughout the world," said the Colombian ambassador to Mexico, José Gabriel Ortiz. Lived in Mexico City for more than three decades, Garcia Marquez was cremated at a private family ceremony in Mexico City last week. The family has not said where the author's final resting place will be but Colombia hopes that the family will divide Garcia Marquez's ashes between his homeland and Mexico.
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