> Skip to content
  • Published: 3 November 2020
  • ISBN: 9780241444184
  • Imprint: Viking
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $22.99

The Scandal of the Century

and Other Writings




A new collection of journalism from one of the great titans of twentieth century literature

"I don't want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude or for the Nobel Prize but rather for my journalism," Gabriel García Márquez said in the final years of his life. And while some of his journalistic writings have been made available over the years, this is the first volume to gather a representative selection from across the first four decades of his career - years during which he worked as a full-time, often muckraking, and controversial journalist, even as he penned the fiction that would bring him the Nobel Prize in 1982.
The Scandal of the Century brings together the first pieces he wrote while working for newspapers in the coastal Colombian cities of Cartagena and Barranquilla . . . his longer, more fiction-like reportage from Paris and Rome . . . his monthly columns for Spain's El País. And while all the work points to his fiction in its style, wit, depth, and passion, these fifty pieces are, more than anything, a revelation of the writer working at the profession he believed to be 'the best in the world'.

  • Published: 3 November 2020
  • ISBN: 9780241444184
  • Imprint: Viking
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Gabriel Garcia Márquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in 1927 near Aracataca, Colombia. He is the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Living to Tell the Tale, among other works of fiction and non-fiction. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. He lives in Mexico City.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born on 6 March 1927 in Aractaca, Colombia, and died on 17 April 2014 in Mexico City, aged 87.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 for a body of work that includes novels, works of non-fiction and collections of short stories.

His most famous works include Leaf Storm (1955), In Evil Hour (1962), One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the Patriarch(1975), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), The General in His Labyrinth (1989), News of a Kidnapping (1996), Living to Tell the Tale (2002) and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004).

Also by Gabriel Garcia Márquez

See all

Praise for The Scandal of the Century

The articles and columns in The Scandal of the Century demonstrate that his forthright, lightly ironical voice just seemed to be there, right from the start. . . . He's among those rare great fiction writers whose ancillary work is almost always worth finding. . . . He had a way of connecting the souls in all his writing, fiction and nonfiction, to the melancholy static of the universe.

The New York Times

García Márquez always thought of himself as a journalist first and foremost and this brilliant collection goes a long way towards justifying that belief. Or, at least, it puts his journalism on the same level as his fiction, which is quite some level.

Salman Rushdie

In his journalism, García Márquez's prose was as precise, euphonious and inventive as it was in his fiction. Only a magician of a translator like Anne McLean could get it right. For anyone who has been enthralled by One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Scandal of the Century is an essential book.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling