Photo courtesy Murtaza Ali/ White Star
Many renowned writers, including George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Ernest Hemingway, started their writing careers as journalists and then achieved fame in the world of literature.
Marquez, in an interview with the literary magazine The Paris Review, said, “I’ve always been convinced that my true profession is that of a journalist. What I didn’t like about journalism before were the working conditions.” He had expressed his joy at any chance of doing “a great piece of journalism” even when he had become a famous novelist. One of his most famous works, Love in the Time of Cholera, was based on a news story that he had read about two old American lovers who would have annual trysts in Mexico until they were killed at the age of 80. Marquez spoke about it in his interview published in The New York Times in 1988.