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Signs of a thaw in writers' feud

Giles Tremlett

After 30 years, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa make up

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Madrid: One of the world's iciest literary feuds, sealed with a punch-up in a cinema 30 years ago, is thawing: Colombian Nobel prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa will publish together.

A special edition of Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, to mark this year's 40th anniversary of its publication, is to include a prologue by Vargas Llosa. "Both men are in agreement over this," Spain's Royal Academy, which is publishing the edition, said.

The agreement comes despite the fact the two have not spoken since they came to blows in a Mexican cinema in 1976. The book is to be published in March, when it will be presented to a meeting of national Spanish language academies from around the world at Medellin, Colombia.

The introduction is reported to be an excerpt from Vargas Llosa's laudatory book on Garcia Marquez, published when the two were friends in 1971, called History of a Deicide. The Peruvian writer had apparently refused to allow the book to be republished after his falling out with Garcia Marquez. He finally relented last year, adding it to a collection of his complete works in Spain. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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