Furious Garcia Marquez denies he will never write again

The venerable Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez has set pages fluttering in publishing circles by furiously denying reports that he'll never write again.

"Not only is that not true, but what is true is that I do nothing else but write," Garcia Marquez said at the weekend. The 82-year-old Colombian father of magical realism, who is probably the best known living author in the Spanish-speaking world, was pressed by the Bogota newspaper El Tiempo on whether it was true that he was to publish no more books.

He replied: "I'm a writer, not a publisher. But only I know when the cakes I'm baking in the oven are ready to eat." Garcia Marquez has been a literary giant since the publication of his virtuosic 1967 epic One Hundred Years of Solitude. But he has not published a book since the semi-autobiographical novel Memorias de mis putas tristes (Memories of my Melancholy Whores) appeared in 2004.

Early in 2006, while working on the second volume of his memoirs, Garcia Marquez confessed that he was suffering writer's block for the first time in his life, but he gave no hint that he planned to retire.

The transatlantic literary row was ignited last week when Spanish-language publishing's grande dame, Carmen Balcells, who has been the author's literary agent in Barcelona for decades, regretfully told a Chilean newspaper: "I don't think Garcia Marquez will ever write again, and he's a client who represents 36.2 per cent of my sales".

The British writer Gerald Martin, the author of Garcia Marquez's only authorised biography, added his agreement in the same newspaper, La Tercera, days after Ms Balcells' bombshell: "I don't think Gabo will write any more books. That doesn't seem to me a matter for regret, because as a writer it was his good fortune to have the immense satisfaction of achieving a totally coherent literary trajectory, many years before completing his biological existence."

The furore seems to have been spun from a comment Garcia Marquez made at a book fair in Guadalajara, Mexico, in December. Exhausted after a marathon signing session, he said: "It's hard work writing books – and then having to sign them."

But the writer, who won the Nobel literature prize in 1982, is thought to have one or two books already written, if without publication date, and friends say he is completing a love story. And to suspend his autobiography after one volume published in 2002, leaving the author's life at age 27, surely smacks of unfinished business.

The veteran author may have slowed down, but he's still busy, having recently adapted for cinema his 1996 tale about the Medellin drug baron Pablo Escobar Noticia de un Secuesto (News of a Kidnapping).

The film, which is due to start shooting in October, stars Salma Hayek and possibly Benicio del Toro and Javier Bardem, the Argentinian director Eduardo Costantini said this week.

Garcia Marquez spent years trying to film the story of how Escobar kidnapped 10 journalists to prevent drug traffickers being extradited to the US, Costantini said.

The author's 1985 novel Love in the Time of Cholera was filmed in 2007, starring Bardem, but was not a hit. Critics reckoned Garcia Marquez's imagery was too complex to be successfully transferred to film.