Faces of the week

Our regular look at some of the faces which have made the news this week. Above are GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ (main picture), with LONDON'S WHALE, ANGELINA JOLIE, POPE BENEDICT XVI and SIMON HUGHES.

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

The Nobel-Prize-winning author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, has said he has given up writing. "With my experience, I could write a new novel without any problems," he told the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia. "But people would realise my heart isn't in it."

Fans of the writer will have had some forewarning of his waning desire, having had to wait 10 years for his last novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Meanwhile, Garcia Marquez, now 78, has been in a long-term fight against lymphatic cancer.

So keenly was it anticipated, that Garcia Marquez re-wrote the final chapter in order to trick those who had pirated it on the internet.

Garcia Marquez is best known for his 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. It has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and been translated into 37 languages. In fact, it has outsold every book in Spanish save for the Bible.

So great was its impact at the time, that The New York Times described it as "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the whole human race".

"Gabo" has lost the heart for novels

The book gave birth to what has been called "magic realism", a rich and vibrant blend of the real and the supernatural, fairy tale and folklore, with all the imagination and colour of a South American carnival.

The inspiration for the novel came from Garcia Marquez's 1930s upbringing in a ramshackle house in the small, isolated town of Aracataca in northern Colombia where, as he described in his first book of memoirs, Living to Tell the Tale, his mother and grandmother taught him old folk stories and superstitions.

Garcia Marquez's grandfather was a liberal activist and veteran of Colombia's regular civil wars who was hounded by the guilt of having killed a man "in an affair of honour". It perhaps helps explain why most of Garcia Marquez's novels are set amid social and military strife.

The solitude of Garcia Marquez's upbringing, reflected in his work, first became evident to him when he was sent to school in the capital, Bogota, high up in the Andes mountains.

Voluntary exile

He enrolled as a law student but was soon smitten by the urge to become a journalist and writer. He dropped out of university and returned to the area of his childhood. But it took nearly a decade before he set the publishing world alight with "Solitude".

There followed such other bestsellers as Autumn of the Patriarch and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. In 1982 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Three years later came his second masterpiece, Love in the Time of Cholera, a tale of obsessive love.

By now, Garcia Marquez had built up a reputation as a left-wing political journalist, and as civil war raged around him, he was forced to flee his native Colombia for Europe, notably Spain. Later he went to Mexico where he is now settled.

But he continued to exert influence in his home country through his sponsorship of a journalism school and a weekly magazine called Cambio.

Garcia Marquez's portrait in an Aracataca street

He became a friend of Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, and has visited him in Havana several times.

He has consistently defended Castro against what he sees as the bullying policies of the American government despite criticisms, most notably by the writer Susan Sontag, that the Cuban regime was becoming increasingly repressive.

At one time, Garcia Marquez was being lionised by American academics while being refused entry visas into the US.

This is no longer the case, and Garcia Marquez has been receiving treatment for his cancer in California. He has also holidayed with former US President Bill Clinton, with whom he shares a love of the writer William Faulkner, a great influence on Garcia Marquez's fiction.

His last novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, is the story of a 90-year-old man who wants to celebrate his birthday by taking the virginity of a 14-year-old girl.

Typically provocative, it examines the importance of love, passion, sex and death.

"Gabo", as he's known to his friends, lives with his wife of 50 years, Mercedes Barcha. He initially proposed to her when he was 13, and her acceptance closed the first of a projected trilogy of his memoirs.

Fans and academics alike will be hoping that Gabriel Garcia Marquez's loss of inspiration will not extend to the rest of his account of an extraordinary life.

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LONDON'S WHALE Cartoonists quipped that the deputy prime minister, John Prescott, had gone for a dip in the Thames. The truth was that a northern bottlenosed whale had swum up the river past the House of Commons. According to scientists, the whale had taken a wrong turn at Scotland and lost its way en route to its normal habitat in the Atlantic. The whale later died of dehydration owing to a lack of its natural food, squid, from which it obtains water. Full story

ANGELINA JOLIE Angelina Jolie attended the 2006 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week in her capacity as goodwill envoy for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The actress is believed to be four months pregnant by her partner, Brad Pitt, who accompanied her to the gathering. A Los Angeles judge has granted Jolie's request to change the surnames of her children to reflect Brad Pitt's status as their adoptive father. Full story

POPE BENEDICT XVI Pope Benedict XVI issued his first encyclical this week on the subject of love. In it, he explored the love between man and woman and God's love, and how that love should be reflected in the Roman Catholic Church's charity work. The Pope also announced that he will travel to Poland in May to visit Wadowice, the hometown of his predecessor, John Paul II, as well as the Auschwitz concentration camp. Full story

SIMON HUGHES Having denied being gay only days before, Liberal Democrat leadership contender Simon Hughes this week admitted that he had had relationships with both men and women. He apologised for "misleading" people but offered the excuse that he had wanted to keep his private life private. He remains in the leadership race unlike Mark Oaten who was exposed as having had a six-month relationship with a rent-boy, and stepped down as a contestant at the weekend. Full story

Written by BBC News Profiles Unit's Bob Chaundy