AKIPRESS.COM - Presidents and fellow writers have been paying tribute to Nobel prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez who has died in Mexico aged 87, BBC reported.

The author was considered one of the greatest Spanish-language writers, best known for his masterpiece of magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and U.S. President Barack Obama were those among praising his legacy.

Obama said the world had “lost one of its greatest visionary writers,” while Santos took to Twitter to pay tribute to Garcia Marquez.

“A thousand years of solitude and sadness because of the death of the greatest Colombian of all time! Such giants never die,” he wrote.

Garcia Marquez had been ill and had made few public appearances recently. He was released from hospital in Mexico City last week following a lung and urinary tract infection, but was said to be “very fragile” because of his age.

He achieved fame for pioneering magical realism, a unique blending of the marvelous and the mundane in a way that made the extraordinary seem routine.

One Hundred Years of Solitude sold more than 30 million copies and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

Peruvian Nobel prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa, with whom Garcia Marquez had a long-running feud which resulted in a street fight in 1976, called him a “great writer.”

“His works gave literature great reach and prestige. His novels will survive and will continue to find new readers everywhere,” he told Peruvian media.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto tweeted: “On behalf of Mexico, I express sorrow over the death of one of the greatest writers of our time.”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's other works include Love in the Time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold and The General in His Labyrinth.

The novelist was also an accomplished journalist whose reporting shone in his work News of a Kidnapping.

The novelist was at times a political figure too. His friendship with the former Cuban President Fidel Castro sparked some controversy among literary and political circles in Latin America.

Cuban author and essayist Miguel Barnet said: “Cuba suffers from this death, as do all readers of a writer who is an icon.”