Nobel-prize winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez on Saturday was feeling better after treatment in a Mexico City hospital, but staying put for now, family and officials said.

The 87-year-old Colombian, who has lived in Mexico for over three decades, was admitted as a precaution on Monday suffering from dehydration and a lung infection.

"He is doing well now, and he is eager to get home," his son Gonzalo Garcia Barcha told reporters outside the National Medical Sciences and Nutrition Institute.

While an assistant earlier said the 1982 Nobel laureate might be able to go home as soon as Saturday, Garcia Barcha said it looked likely his father would be released Tuesday.

Garcia Marquez, widely credited with putting magical realism on the map, is seen as one of the finest writers of the 20th century. His masterpiece "One Hundred Years of Solitude" has sold millions of copies and been translated into 35 languages.

AFP