At the end of 1953, after completing Leaf Storm, García Márquez moved to Bogotá to work for El Espectador, the great newspaper of his life (with El Heraldo a close second and El Universal third). It was in that great Liberal daily that his first stories were published in 1947; there that he became one of Colombia’s first cinema critics and a stellar reporter during 1954–5; and there that he would choose to publish his classic articles during the 1980–84 period.

After completing Leaf Storm he had written another narrative set in Macondo, ‘One Day After Saturday’. A long story, it had something of the human, geographical and historical spaciousness of a novel, in clear anticipation of One Hundred Years of Solitude itself. Several of the characters of the eventual novel appear in it and there is a ‘magical realist’ plague of birds dropping dead out of the sky. It received a prize in July 1954 for the best short story published in Colombia during the previous year; but by then García Márquez, who was now doing a different kind of journalism, in a city which always made him think in terms hostile to the national establishment, was beginning to conceive of literature in a different, more political way.