Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014)

If you haven't read journalist and prizewinning Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez's fiction, you probably don't understand the reality of a goodly portion of the Latin American population. The wiki has a good summary of his life and work. There is literally nothing like his fiction, and good English translations are available for some of it. Start with One Hundred Years of Solitude and possibly Love in the Time of Cholera; those are (deservedly) his best-known works in the anglophone world. R.I.P., Gabriel García Márquez.