He may be Colombian, but Gabriel García Márquez is receiving plenty of amor from Mexico…

The 85-year-old Nobel Prize-winning writer and journalist, who has been living in Mexico since the 1970s, has been awarded a Fine Arts Medal from the Mexican government.

In 1982, García Márquez, who will be the subject of a new film starring Roselyn Sanchez, received the Nobel Prize in 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.” He was the first Colombian and fourth Latin American to win a Nobel Prize for Literature.

“On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Gabriel García Márquez, the Fine Arts Medal will be presented to the journalist and writer,” the National Council for Culture and the Arts announced in a statement.

The Fine Arts Medal is the highest honor conferred by Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts on outstanding figures in the world of theater, dance, the plastic arts, music or literature.

The award is presented to luminaries who’ve had brilliant careers and significantly influenced the country’s artistic and cultural life.

The last person to be so honored was Argentine poet Juan Gelman, who received the award last weekend for the “talent and tenacity” he has expressed over his long career.

Other recipients of the medal include Mexican architect Teodoro Gonzalez de Leon and cellist Carlos Prieto.

No word yet on when García Márquez‘s medal presentation will take place.