A source close to the family of Nobel laureate novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez announced that the Columbian writer died on Thursday, according to breaking news reports from the Associated Press. He was 87 years old.

Earlier this week, his family released a statement saying that the health of the literary giant was stable but "very fragile" and that "there are risks of complications" due to his old age, reports CNN.

The beloved short-story writer and author was recovering at his home in Mexico City since April 8 after being hospitalized for nine days for infections in his lungs and his urinary tract.

On Monday, Mexican's leading newspaper, El Universal, reported that he was battling metastasized cancer and that the cancer spread to his lungs, lymph nodes and liver. He was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer about 12 years ago, which the Nobel Prize winner successfully battled. However, his family and the Colombian president denied speculation that cancer had resurfaced in his body.

"It's not true what they published on a Mexican newspaper that his cancer has come back ... He suffered from pneumonia, at an advanced age, and that pneumonia is under control," Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos told Radio Caracol Popayan on Wednesday, according to Fox News Latino.

Marquez, who was known as "Gabo," was born in the northern Colombian town of Aracataca. In 1982, he won the Nobel Prize for literature "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts," according to the Nobel Prize website.