Gerald Martin

Gerald Martin is a critic of Latin American fiction. He is particularly known for his work on the Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias and on the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, both of whom are winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

His 2008 book, Gabriel García Márquez. A Life, was the first full biography of García Márquez to be published in English.

Biography

Gerald Martin (London 1944) studied Spanish, French and Portuguese at Bristol (1965) and received his PhD in Latin American Literature from the University of Edinburgh (1970). He spent a year in Cochabamba, Bolivia, with VSO (1965-6). He also carried out postgraduate work in UNAM, Mexico (1968-9) and was a visiting scholar at Stanford University (1971-2), thanks to a Harkness Fellowship. By 1990 he had visited every country in Latin America. He taught for many years at Portsmouth Polytechnic, where he helped to organise the world’s first undergraduate degree in Latin American Studies, which pioneered the student year abroad in Latin America. In 1984 he became the first Professor of Hispanic Studies in the Polytechnic sector. He worked for 25 years as the only English-speaking member of the Colección Archivos in Paris and in Pittsburgh became President of the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. During the period 1992-2007 he was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Languages in the University of Pittsburgh.