Shipwrecked sailor in Garcia Marquez tale dies

Luis Alejandro Velasco's harrowing journey of survival aboard a life raft inspired Gabriel Garcia Marquez's bestseller "The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor"

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) -- A Colombian shipwreck survivor whose 10-day odyssey adrift in the Caribbean inspired a novel by Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez that sold 22 million copies worldwide died Wednesday, his wife said.

Former Navy sailor Luis Alejandro Velasco, who was 66, died after a long battle with cancer at his home in Bogota, his wife Blanca told Reuters.

He first met Garcia Marquez, then a newspaper reporter, in early 1955 shortly after he washed ashore on Colombia's northern beaches.

Velasco survived for 10 days aboard a fragile life raft after he jumped overboard from a sinking Navy warship. The vessel had been overloaded with contraband electrical goods, allegedly being smuggled from the United States to Colombia for the military high command.

Garcia Marquez, one of the greats of Latin American literature, wrote a series of reports about Velasco in El Espectador, Colombia's oldest newspaper.

Then in 1970, he published a novel about the incident entitled "Story Of A Shipwreck Survivor" (Relato de Un Naufrago). Velasco received about $26,000 in royalties for the original Spanish language version, according to a recent report in El Espectador.

Royalty payments stopped abruptly in the mid-1980s after Velasco unsuccessfully sued Garcia Marquez for rights to sales of the book translated into 36 other languages.

Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982. With the 1967 publication of his seminal work "One Hundred Years of Solitude," Garcia Marquez staked his claim as one of the prime exponents of "magic realism," a genre that in his own words encompasses "myth, magic and other extraordinary phenomena."

Garcia Marquez, now 73, received treatment for lymphatic cancer last year.

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Almanac: Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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Biography: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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