Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa in 1936 and spent his early childhood with his mother’s family in Cochabamba, Bolivia, having been told that his father was dead. Later, back in Peru, he was sent to the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, an experience that would supply his first novel. He studied law and literature at the National University of San Marcos, married young, and in the late 1950s left for Madrid on a scholarship before moving to Paris, where he wrote prolifically while living on very little.

The Time of the Hero (1963), set among the cadets of a Lima military school, made his name and placed him at the centre of the Latin American Boom. The Green House and Conversation in The Cathedral followed, the latter a many-voiced inquiry into the corrupting reach of the Odría dictatorship. His range proved unusually wide: the comic Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, the vast Brazilian epic The War of the End of the World, and The Feast of the Goat, a study of the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. An early supporter of the Cuban revolution, he broke with it after the poet Heberto Padilla was imprisoned in 1971, and became a classical liberal; in 1990 he ran for the Peruvian presidency and lost to Alberto Fujimori.

He took Spanish citizenship in 1993, received the Cervantes Prize the following year, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010 for his cartography of power and his images of individual resistance and defeat. He was made a marquess by King Juan Carlos I and in 2021 was elected to the Académie française. His essays and journalism kept him a combative public figure to the end. He died in Lima in April 2025, at the age of eighty-nine.