Colombia's Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez was being treated at a Mexico City hospital for a lung infection but he was doing well, his son and officials said.

The health ministry said the 87-year-old author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" has been in a hospital since Monday due to dehydration as well as lung and urinary tract infections.

The novelist "has responded to treatment and once he finishes taking antibiotics, his discharge will be examined," the ministry said in a statement.

His most famous novel, "One Hundred Years of Solitude," has been translated into 35 languages and sold more than 30 million copies.

The book, first published in 1967, is a historical and literary saga about a family from the imaginary Caribbean village of Macondo between the 19th and 20th century.

The Nobel Committee awarded him the 1982 prize "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."

Diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 1999, which he overcame, Garcia Marquez has seldom appeared in public in recent years.

He lives in Mexico City with his wife, Mercedes Barcha, mother of his two children.

His most recent novel is "Memories of My Melancholy Whores," published in 2004.