Gabriel Garcia Marquez quits writing

Celebrated Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez has retired from writing, the Nobel Prize winner's agent told a Chilean paper. 

"I don't think that Garcia Marquez will write anything else," Carmen Balcells was quoted as saying by the La Tercera newspaper on Thursday. 

Garcia Marquez, the pioneer of the literary school of magical realism, won a reputation in 1967, when his One Hundred Years of Solitude was published. 

The 82-year-old has not written anything since the publication of Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores five years ago. 

His biographer, Gerald Martin, also told La Tercera that he doubted if anything new will be published in Garcia Marquez's lifetime. 

"I also believe that Gabo won't write any more books, but I don't think this is too regrettable, because as a writer it was his destiny to have the immense satisfaction of having a totally coherent literary career many years before the end of his natural life." 

This is while Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, a Colombian writer and a friend of Garcia Marquez, had said last year that Garcia Marquez was working on a new novel. 

The Colombian media had also said earlier that a new book by Garcia Marquez, tentatively titled We Will See Each Other in August was to be published later in 2009. 

Marquez, the 1982 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, had told fans at a Mexican book fair last December that he was becoming worn out by writing.