Álvaro Cepeda Samudio

Álvaro Cepeda Samudio (March 30, 1926 – October 12, 1972) was a Colombian journalist, novelist, short story writer, and filmmaker. Within Colombia and the rest of Latin America, he is known in his own right as an important and innovative writer and journalist, largely inspiring much of the artistically, intellectually and politically active climate for which this particular time and place, that of mid-century Colombia, has become known. His fame is considerably more quaint outside his home country, where it derives primarily from his standing as having been part of the influential artistic and intellectual circle in Colombia in which fellow writer and journalist Gabriel García Márquez—with whom he was also a member of the more particularized Barranquilla Group—and painter Alejandro Obregón also played prominent roles. Only one of his works, La casa grande, has received considerable notice beyond the Spanish-speaking world, having been translated into several languages, English and French among them; his fame as a writer has therefore been significantly curtailed in the greater international readership, as the breadth of his literary and journalistic output has reached few audiences beyond those of Latin America and Latin American literary scholars.

Álvaro Cepeda Samudio was born in Barranquilla (although his birthplace is commonly mistaken for the town of Ciénaga, where his family was from), Colombia, two years before striking United Fruit Company workers at Ciénaga's railroad station were massacred by the Colombian army, an event that with age became pivotal to the writer's social- and political-consciousness, as evidenced in its central role in his only novel, La casa grande. Known as the Santa Marta Massacre, the incident is also depicted in Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) (1967), the seminal novel of his close friend Gabriel García Márquez, and served a similar motivating principle in his dedication to social and political awareness through journalism and literature, among other means. He enrolled at the Colegio Americano, an English-language school in Barranquilla, for elementary and high school. In the spring of 1949, he traveled to Ann Arbor, MI, USA and attended the University of Michigan English Language Institute for the summer term. For the fall term in the 1949-50 school year he attended Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. For the winter term, he attended what is now Michigan State University (then Michigan State College) in Lansing, MI before returning home to Barranquilla.

...
Wikipedia