Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa (born March 28, 1936, Arequipa, Peru—died April 13, 2025, Lima) was a Peruvian Spanish writer who was one of the most influential authors of contemporary literature, particularly as a leading figure in the boom of 20th-century Latin American literature. Blending political thought, realism, and personal experience in his writing, Vargas Llosa was noted for his commitment to social change, evident throughout his novels, plays, and essays. In 1990 he was an unsuccessful candidate for president of Peru. He was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”

Early life and influences

Vargas Llosa received his early education in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where his grandfather was the Peruvian consul. He attended a series of schools in Peru before entering a military school, Leoncio Prado, in Lima in 1950; he later attended the University of San Marcos in Lima. He was an ardent Marxist and supported the Cuban Revolution (1959) and its communist leader, Fidel Castro. In later years Vargas Llosa moved to the center-right politically, defending free markets and private enterprise, although he maintained liberal views on issues such as gay rights.

As a writer, Vargas Llosa was influenced by 19th-century novelists such as Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky and French writer Honoré de Balzac as well as 20th-century figures, in particular American novelist William Faulkner. In 1990 Vargas Llosa told The Paris Review, “He was the first novelist whose work I consciously tried to reconstruct by attempting to trace, for example, the organization of time, the intersection of time and place, the breaks in the narrative, and that ability he has of telling a story from different points of view in order to create a certain ambiguity, to give it added depth.”

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First publications and life as an expatriate

Vargas Llosa’s first published work was La huida del Inca (1952; “The Escape of the Inca”), a three-act play. Thereafter his stories began to appear in Peruvian literary reviews, and he coedited Cuadernos de composición (1956–57; “Composition Books”) and Literatura (1958–59). He worked as a journalist and broadcaster and attended the University of Madrid. In 1959 he moved to Paris, where he lived until 1966 in a Latin American expatriate community that included Argentine Julio Cortázar and Chilean Jorge Edwards. He later set his novel Travesuras de la niña mala (2006; The Bad Girl) in Paris during this period, its plot a reflection of Vargas Llosa’s lifelong appreciation of French novelist Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857).

Literary works and political career

Vargas Llosa’s first novel, La ciudad y los perros (1963; “The City and the Dogs,” Eng. trans. The Time of the Hero), was widely acclaimed. Translated into more than a dozen languages, this novel, set in the Leoncio Prado, describes adolescents striving for survival in a hostile and violent environment. The corruption of the military school reflects the larger malaise afflicting Peru. The book was filmed twice, in Spanish (1985) and in Russian (1986), the second time as Yaguar.

The novel La casa verde (1966; The Green House), set in the Peruvian jungle, combines mythical, popular, and heroic elements to capture the sordid, tragic, and fragmented reality of its characters. Los jefes (1967; The Cubs and Other Stories, filmed as The Cubs, 1973) is a psychoanalytic portrayal of an adolescent who has been accidentally castrated. Conversación en la catedral (1969; Conversation in the Cathedral) deals with Manuel Odría’s regime (1948–56) and draws upon Vargas Llosa’s earlier experience working as a night reporter for a Lima newspaper. The novel Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973; “Pantaleón and the Visitors,” filmed in Spanish, 1975; Eng. trans. Captain Pantoja and the Special Services, filmed 2000) is a satire of the Peruvian military and religious fanaticism.

Vargas Llosa’s semi-autobiographical novel La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, filmed 1990 as Tune in Tomorrow) combines two distinct narrative points of view to produce a contrapuntal effect. It is based on his relationship with his uncle’s sister-in-law, Julia Urquidi Illanes, whom Vargas Llosa married in 1955 when he was 19. (They divorced in 1964, and Vargas Llosa then married Patricia Llosa, his first cousin. They had three children before divorcing in 2015.)

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Vargas Llosa also wrote a critical study of the fiction of Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez in García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio (1971; “García Márquez: Story of a God-Killer”). Their initial friendship turned into a feud, which in 1976 escalated into a storied physical altercation in Mexico City. Subjects of Vargas Llosa’s other critical studies include Flaubert in La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y “Madame Bovary” (1975; The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary) and the works of French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in Entre Sartre y Camus (1981; “Between Sartre and Camus”).

After living three years in London, Vargas Llosa was a writer-in-residence at Washington State University in 1969. In 1970 he settled in Barcelona. He returned to Lima in 1974 and lectured and taught widely throughout the world. A collection of his critical essays in English translation was published in 1978. La guerra del fin del mundo (1981; The War of the End of the World), an account of the 19th-century political conflicts in Brazil, became a best seller in Spanish-speaking countries. Three of his plays—La señorita de Tacna (1981; The Young Lady of Tacna), Kathie y el hipopotamo (1983; Kathie and the Hippopotamus), and La chunga (1986; “The Jest”; Eng. trans. La chunga)—were published in Three Plays (1990).

In 1990 Vargas Llosa lost his bid for the presidency of Peru in a runoff against Alberto Fujimori, an agricultural engineer and the son of Japanese immigrants. Vargas Llosa wrote about this experience in El pez en el agua: memorias (1993; A Fish in the Water: A Memoir). In 2012 he told The Guardian, “I learned from my political experiences that I am a writer, not a politician. Part of the reasons I have lived the life I have is because I wanted to have an adventurous life. But my best adventures are more literary than political.”

Vargas Llosa became a citizen of Spain in 1993 and was awarded the Cervantes Prize the following year. Despite his new nationality, he continued to write about Peru in such novels as Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (1997; The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto). His later works include the novels La fiesta del chivo (2000; The Feast of the Goat; film 2005), El paraíso en la otra esquina (2003; The Way to Paradise), Travesuras de la niña mala (2006; The Bad Girl), El sueño del celta (2010; The Dream of the Celt), El héroe discreto (2013; The Discreet Hero), Cinco esquinas (2016; The Neighborhood), and Tiempos recios (2019; Harsh Times). His last novel, Le dedico mi silencio (“I Dedicate My Silence to You”), was published in 2023.

Vargas Llosa also wrote the nonfiction volumes Cartas a un joven novelista (1997; Letters to a Young Novelist), El lenguaje de la pasión (2001; The Language of Passion), and La civilización del espectáculo (2012; “The Civilization of Entertainment”). The pamphlet Mi trayectoria intelectual (2014; My Intellectual Journey) contains a speech he gave documenting his drift away from Marxist ideology and toward liberalism. In La llamada de la tribu (2018; “The Call of the Tribe”), which was described as an “intellectual autobiography,” Vargas Llosa examined the works that influenced him.

Nobel Prize and other projects

Upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, Vargas Llosa gave a lecture that defended liberal democracy and freedom of speech: “Let those who doubt that literature not only submerges us in the dream of beauty and happiness but alerts us to every kind of oppression, ask themselves why all regimes determined to control the behavior of citizens from cradle to grave fear it so much they establish systems of censorship to repress it and keep so wary an eye on independent writers.”

In 2015 Vargas Llosa made his acting debut at the Teatro Real in Madrid, where he appeared as a duke in Los cuentos de la peste (“Tales of the Plague”), his stage adaptation of 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron.