Gabriel Garcia Marquez to feature on Colombia bank notes

The House of Representatives passed a bill on Tuesday asking the central bank to print a series of notes featuring the Nobel Prize winner's face.

Garcia Marquez, the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and other popular works of magic realism, died in April in Mexico City.

The bill also foresees the creation of student grants in his honour.

Tribute

The bill did not stipulate which denomination will feature the writer's picture or when the notes will come into circulation.

Representative Antenor Duran, who introduced the bill, said that "the initiative, apart from paying him tribute, aims to ensure that future generations know this great Colombian humanist, literary figure and democrat".

Last month, the University of Texas at Austin bought the Garcia Marquez archive for an undisclosed price.

Both Colombia and Mexico expressed their disappointment over the move.

Garcia Marquez is hailed as Colombia's most famous writer, but he spent much of his life in Mexico, where he died on 17 April.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts".