Gabriel Garcia Marquez had a love child

The Nobel prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez once said that we all have three lives: the public, the private and the secret. Nearly eight years after his death, the Colombian author's own secret has emerged: a daughter with a Mexican woman 33 years his junior.

In the 1990s García Márquez had an affair with Mexican writer Susana Cato, with whom he worked on two film scripts, reports The Times UK.

Their daughter was named Indira, after the former Indian prime minister, Indira Gandhi, whom García Márquez admired and who was reported to have been the first person to congratulate him when he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1982.

Indira is now in her early 30s and uses her mother's surname.

At the time of Indira's birth, García Márquez was married, apparently happily, to Mercedes Barcha. Márquez was married for more than five decades to Mercedes Barcha and the couple had two children named Rodrigo and Gonzalo

Some family members said they had not spoken about the writer's daughter previously out of "respect" for Mercedes Barcha who died in August 2020.