Top 10 Magical Realism Authors

Introduction

Magical Realism is a genre that blends the magical with the real. It’s like fantasy, except it has elements of reality and doesn’t take place in some alternate universe. In this post, I’ll show you a list of authors who write good magical realism fiction and a brief of their lives. In later posts I will dive into each writer in deeper detail.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Colombian writer born in 1927, is one of the most influential authors in magical realism. His novel One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in 1967 and has been translated into more than 30 languages. The book won him a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 and has sold over 30 million copies worldwide.

Other notable books by Garcia Marquez include Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) and The General in His Labyrinth (1994).

Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1927 in the town of Aracataca, Colombia. He was raised by his grandparents and developed an interest in writing at a young age; he would often write stories for school assignments. He attended the University of Cartagena and graduated with a degree in law. His first published work was The Voice of the Ship, which appeared in a local newspaper when he was just 17 years old.

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie was born in India and moved to London as a child, where he still lives today. His first novel, Grimus (1975), was followed by Midnight’s Children (1980), which won him the Booker Prize in 1981. He has continued to write novels exploring themes of identity and faith in modern society; his most recent work is The Golden House (2019).

Rushdie has been critical of Islamic regimes such as those governing Iran since at least 1989 when he published The Satanic Verses–a book that led to death threats from leaders of Iran’s government over its depiction of Muhammad’s life. In 1998 he was forced into hiding for nine months after Ayatollah Khomeini issued an edict calling for his assassination because of this book’s perceived blasphemy against Islam

Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende was born in Peru to a Chilean diplomat and his wife. She spent her childhood in Venezuela and later studied journalism in the United States.
At age 14, Allende wrote her first novel, The House of Spirits (1982), which became an international bestseller translated into more than 30 languages. Her other novels include Of Love & Shadows (1994), Island Beneath The Sea (2004) and Zorro (2010).

Allende is also a political activist who has supported women’s rights, among other causes. In 2004, she was named an ambassador for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). She lives in California with her second husband and has three children from previous marriages.

Laura Esquivel

Laura Esquivel is a Mexican novelist best known for her novel Like Water for Chocolate. She has also written other novels, short stories, and children’s books. She is a recipient of the Premio Planeta de Novela.

In this book you can read about how Tita falls in love with Pedro and they get married but she cannot be with him because she has an obligation to keep her mother’s house after she died so that everyone could stay there until they find their own houses or until Tita dies as well (which never happens).

Tita can only be near Pedro when he comes to visit every year on his birthday because if she touches him then he will die!

Robertson Davies

Born in Ontario, Canada, in 1913, Davies was a prolific writer who wrote many novels and plays. He won numerous awards during his lifetime including the Order of Canada and he received the Queen’s Jubilee Medal in 1977.
The Deptford Trilogy (1957-59) is a series of novels that follow the history of an English Canadian town from World War I through World War II. This trilogy consists of Fifth Business (also published as A Mixture of Frailties), The Manticore and World My Wilderness; all three are available as eBooks from Open Road Media.
His second trilogy–The Salterton Trilogy–comprises What’s Bred in the Bone (1990), The Lyre of Orpheus (1992) and The Rebel Angels (1993).

Jorge Luis Borges

Borges was a Spanish-Argentine writer who wrote short stories, poetry, and essays. He is best known for his fiction. His work has been compared to Kafka’s by many critics but he rejected this comparison as inaccurate because he did not consider himself an existentialist like Kafka and other writers who inspired him (such as Chesterton). Borges was also influenced by Poe and Poe’s criticism of realism in literature; instead of focusing on the details of reality–which he felt were boring–he focused on creating new worlds with fantastical elements that would be more interesting to read about than reality could ever be!

Borges’ most famous story is “The Library of Babel,” which takes place in an endless library containing every possible book ever written or imagined: every combination possible from twenty-two letters arranged into combinations that form words which can then be combined into sentences…and so on until infinity!

Jorge Luis Borges – A brief on the creator of Magical Realism and thought provoking Literary Fiction

Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass was a German novelist and poet who wrote The Tin Drum, which won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. He was born on October 16th, 1927 and died on April 13th, 2015 at age 87.

In 1942 he joined the Nazi party but left after only six months because he didn’t agree with their views. He served as an infantryman during World War II until he was injured by shrapnel from an Allied bomb blast that killed his friend Johannes Kienzl (who later became one of his closest friends). After recovering from his injuries he studied art history at universities in Freiburg im Breisgau and Cologne before moving back to Gdansk where he worked as an artist while writing poetry which eventually led him into becoming a novelist instead!

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was an Italian writer who wrote novels, short stories, essays and criticism. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971 and also a member of the Italian Communist Party from 1945 to 1948.

Calvino’s best-known works include Invisible Cities (1972), If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979) and The Baron in the Trees (1957).

Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes is a Mexican writer, essayist and diplomat. He was born in Panama City, Panama on July 31st 1928. He is a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua (Mexican Language Academy) and has won many literary awards including:

Order of the Aztec Eagle (1968)
Prince of Asturias Award for Literature (1985)
Cervantes Prize (1990)
Miguel de Cervantes Prize from Spain’s Ministry of Culture(1991)

Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese novelist, short story writer and essayist. He was born in Kyoto, Japan on January 12, 1949. He started writing in the late 1970s and published his first novel — Hear the Wind Sing — in 1979.

He is best known for his surrealistic fiction and has been called an “international phenomenon.” His most famous works include Norwegian Wood (1987), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994) and Kafka on the Shore (2002).

This list will give you all kinds of good magical realism fiction to read.

Here is a list of some of the best magical realism authors and their books.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities (not really magical realism but close enough), The Baron in the Trees.
Alice Hoffman: Practical Magic; Turtle Moon; Here on Earth; The Story Sisters

Conclusion

I hope this list has helped you find some new magical realism authors to enjoy. If there are any other authors that we missed, please let us know in the comments below!

Tags: Authors, Magical, Magical Realism