García Márquez

In his ground-breaking novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colombia's Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel García Márquez famously highlighted the massacre of workers on banana plantations in the country in the 1920s.

In 1976, he punched Gabriel García Márquez in a Mexico City movie theater, leaving the writer with a deep welt around his eye.

García Márquez famously posed for a smiling portrait with a black eye and theories quickly abounded about the reason for the fight — the principal ones having to do with García Márquez consoling Patricia in the wake of reputed infidelities by her husband.

Its leading authors, who included Vargas Llosa's Colombian friend and sometime rival Gabriel García Márquez - who pioneered the kaleidoscopic magical realism style of writing - became household names and their works were read around the world.

Famously the two authors did not speak to each other for decades after Vargas Llosa punched García Márquez in the face in a Mexican cinema in 1976.