Latest news with #LaCiudadylosPerros
See - Sada Elbalad
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- See - Sada Elbalad
Popular Peruvian Author Mario Vargas Llosa Passes away
Rana Atef On Sunday, popular Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, who is a Nobel literature laureate, passed away at the age of 89 years old in Lima. Llosa most celebrated novels include 'The Time of the Hero' (La Ciudad y los Perros) and 'Feast of the Goat.' He won the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature. The news of his death was announced by his children, saying in a letter posted on X: 'It is with deep sorrow that we announce that our father, Mario Vargas Llosa, passed away peacefully in Lima today, surrounded by his family." It added: 'His departure will sadden his relatives, his friends and his readers around the world, but we hope that they will find comfort, as we do, in the fact that he enjoyed a long, adventurous and fruitful life, and leaves behind him a body of work that will outlive him." Llosa was born on 28 March 1936, in Arequipa, Peru. Vargas Llosa started writing early, and he worked as a part-time crime reporter at the age of 15 at La Crónica newspaper. He published his first short story collection, The Cubs and Other Stories ("Los Jefes") in 1959. In 1963, he published his first novel, The Time of the Hero, which echoed his experiences at a Peruvian military academy and angered the country's military. read more New Tourism Route To Launch in Old Cairo Ahmed El Sakka-Led Play 'Sayidati Al Jamila' to Be Staged in KSA on Dec. 6 Mandy Moore Joins Season 2 of "Dr. Death" Anthology Series Don't Miss These Movies at 44th Cairo Int'l Film Festival Today Amr Diab to Headline KSA's MDLBEAST Soundstorm 2022 Festival Arts & Culture Mai Omar Stuns in Latest Instagram Photos Arts & Culture "The Flash" to End with Season 9 Arts & Culture Ministry of Culture Organizes four day Children's Film Festival Arts & Culture Canadian PM wishes Muslims Eid-al-Adha News Egypt confirms denial of airspace access to US B-52 bombers News Ayat Khaddoura's Final Video Captures Bombardment of Beit Lahia Lifestyle Pistachio and Raspberry Cheesecake Domes Recipe News Australia Fines Telegram $600,000 Over Terrorism, Child Abuse Content Arts & Culture Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban's $4.7M LA Home Burglarized Videos & Features Bouchra Dahlab Crowned Miss Arab World 2025 .. Reem Ganzoury Wins Miss Arab Africa Title (VIDEO) Sports Neymar Announced for Brazil's Preliminary List for 2026 FIFA World Cup Qualifiers News Prime Minister Moustafa Madbouly Inaugurates Two Indian Companies Arts & Culture New Archaeological Discovery from 26th Dynasty Uncovered in Karnak Temple Arts & Culture Arwa Gouda Gets Married (Photos)
The Guardian
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘We waited greedily for his novels': Mario Vargas Llosa, a revolutionary of Spanish-language fiction
The early 1960s was, for my generation in Argentina, an age of discovery when, in our mid-teens, we learned about sex, metaphysics, the Beatles, Ezra Pound, Che Guevara, Fellini's films, and the new literature of Latin America. In the bookstore around the corner from my school, there began to appear novels with black-and-white photographs on the dust jackets whose Spanish-language authors, while acknowledging Borges as the fons et origo of all literary endeavours, attempted to find in the 19th-century European realists new ways to depict the troubled reality of Spain and South America. One of those novels was La Ciudad y los Perros (The City and the Dogs, oddly translated into English as The Time of the Hero) by a young, unknown Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, who, in 1962, had won the recently created Premio Biblioteca Breve in Spain. Our literature teacher, while encouraging us to explore the transgressive fields of surrealism and fantastic fiction, thought that this novel was too extreme for adolescent imaginations: too much youthful violence; too much murky sex; too much questioning of authority. There had been nothing like it in Spanish-language fiction before. A fierce indictment of Peru's military system, incandescent with rage against the hypocrisy of the established order as mirrored in Lima's most prestigious military academy (which the author had attended), it was also the chronicle of an adolescent rite of passage into the ranks of the commanding patriarchy. The book so incensed the Peruvian authorities that, in the tradition of the city's founding fathers, an auto-da-fé was ordered and dozens of copies were burned in the academy's courtyard. At the very start of what was labelled by canny publishers as the 'boom' of Latin-American literature, Vargas Llosa's book was recognised as a modern subversive classic. Until then, the so-called 'novel of protest' in the literatures of Latin America had Zola as its model. Under the large shadow of the author of La Terre and Germinal, writers such as Ciro Alegría and José María Arguedas had written about the lives of those whom our European culture had taught us to deny. Vargas Llosa didn't follow Zola but rather chose Flaubert as his guide, writing a decade later a splendid essay, The Perpetual Orgy, in which he argued that Madame Bovary kickstarted the modern novel by establishing an 'objective' narrator who, because they refused to preach, gave the illusion of telling a story that was true. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion We waited with greedy expectation for Vargas Llosa's next novels, The Green House (1966) and Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), and later Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973) and the erotically humorous Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), all the time trying to discover who this man was who, in public life, swayed his political alliances from left to right, all the time remaining committed, in his fiction, to basic precepts of human empathy. The young Vargas Llosa, like so many South-American intellectuals, had supported Castro's revolution, but after the imprisonment of the poet Heberto Padilla he declared himself an opposer to the Cuban regime. Almost two decades later, Vargas Llosa became the head of the centre-right party Movimiento Libertad, and entered into a coalition with two other centre-right politicians. In 1990, as candidate to the presidency, Vargas Llosa lost to Alberto Fujimori, who was later sentenced to 25 years in prison for human rights abuses, and later still, unlawfully pardoned. From then on, Vargas Llosa restricted his political activism to his frequent newspaper columns and, much more subtly and effectively, to his fiction, for which he was awarded, in 2010, the Nobel prize.
The Hill
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hill
Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian author and Nobel literature laureate, dies at 89
LIMA, Peru (AP) — Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel literature laureate and a giant of Latin American letters, died Sunday. He was 89. He was a prolific author and essayist with such celebrated novels as 'The Time of the Hero' (La Ciudad y los Perros) and 'Feast of the Goat,' and won myriad prizes. The Nobel committee said it was awarding him in 2010 'for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat.' 'It is with deep sorrow that we announce that our father, Mario Vargas Llosa, passed away peacefully in Lima today, surrounded by his family,' read a letter signed by his children Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana, and posted by Álvaro on X. 'His departure will sadden his relatives, his friends and his readers around the world, but we hope that they will find comfort, as we do, in the fact that he enjoyed a long, adventurous and fruitful life, and leaves behind him a body of work that will outlive him,' they added. The author's lawyer and close friend, Enrique Ghersi, confirmed the death to The Associated Press and recalled the writer's last birthday on March 28 at the home of his daughter, Morgana. 'He spent it happy; his close friends surrounded him, he ate his cake, we joked that day that there were still 89 more years to go, he had a long, fruitful, and free life,' Ghersi said. Tributes poured in for Vargas Llosa. In Spain, where he spent long stretches of his life, King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia expressed their condolences, writing on social media that 'the Olympus of universal literature has opened its doors to Mario Vargas Llosa.' Latin America's new wave of writers Vargas Llosa published his first collection of stories 'The Cubs and Other Stories' (Los Jefes) in 1959. But he burst onto the literary stage in 1963 with his groundbreaking debut 'The Time of the Hero,' a novel that drew on his experiences at a Peruvian military academy and angered the country's military. A thousand copies were burned by military authorities, with some generals calling the book false and Vargas Llosa a communist. That, and subsequent novels such as 'Conversation in the Cathedral,' (Conversación en la Catedral) in 1969, quickly established Vargas Llosa as one of the leaders of the so-called 'Boom,' or new wave of Latin American writers of the 1960s and 1970s, alongside Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. Vargas Llosa started writing early, and at 15 was a part-time crime reporter for La Crónica newspaper. According to his official website, other jobs he had included revising names on cemetery tombs in Peru, working as a teacher in the Berlitz school in Paris and briefly on the Spanish desk at Agence France-Presse in Paris. He continued publishing articles in the press for most of his life, most notably in a twice-monthly political opinion column titled 'Piedra de Toque' (Touchstones) that was printed in several newspapers. Vargas Llosa came to be a fierce defender of personal and economic liberties, gradually edging away from his communism-linked past, and regularly attacked Latin American leftist leaders he viewed as dictators. Although an early supporter of the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro, he later grew disillusioned and denounced Castro's Cuba. By 1980, he said he no longer believed in socialism as a solution for developing nations. In a famous incident in Mexico City in 1976, Vargas Llosa punched fellow Nobel Prize winner and ex-friend García Márquez, whom he later ridiculed as 'Castro's courtesan.' It was never clear whether the fight was over politics or a personal dispute, as neither writer ever wanted to discuss it publicly. As he slowly turned his political trajectory toward free-market conservatism, Vargas Llosa lost the support of many of his Latin American literary contemporaries and attracted much criticism even from admirers of his work. A pampered early life and 'hell' in a military school Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was born March 28, 1936, in Peru's southern city of Arequipa, high in the Andes at the foot of the Misti volcano. His father, Ernesto Vargas Maldonado, left the family before he was born. To avoid public scandal, his mother, Dora Llosa Ureta, took her child to Bolivia, where her father was the Peruvian consul in Cochabamba. Vargas Llosa said his early life was 'somewhat traumatic,' pampered by his mother and grandmother in a large house with servants, his every whim granted. It was not until he was 10, after the family had moved to Peru's coastal city of Piura, that he learned his father was alive. His parents reconciled and the family moved to Peru's capital, Lima. Vargas Llosa described his father as a disciplinarian who viewed his son's love of Jules Verne and writing poetry as surefire routes to starvation, and feared for his 'manhood,' believing that 'poets are always homosexuals.' After failing to get the boy enrolled in a naval academy because he was underage, Vargas Llosa's father sent him to Leoncio Prado Military Academy — an experience that was to stay with Vargas Llosa and led to 'The Time of the Hero.' The book won the Spanish Critics Award. The military academy 'was like discovering hell,' Vargas Llosa said later. He entered Peru's San Marcos University to study literature and law, 'the former as a calling and the latter to please my family, which believed, not without certain cause, that writers usually die of hunger.' After earning his literature degree in 1958 — he didn't bother submitting his final law thesis — Vargas Llosa won a scholarship to pursue a doctorate in Madrid. Vargas Llosa drew much of his inspiration from his Peruvian homeland, but preferred to live abroad, residing for spells each year in Madrid, New York and Paris. His early novels revealed a Peruvian world of military arrogance and brutality, of aristocratic decadence, and of Stone Age Amazon Indians existing simultaneously with 20th-century urban blight. 'Peru is a kind of incurable illness and my relationship to it is intense, harsh and full of the violence of passion,' Vargas Llosa wrote in 1983. After 16 years in Europe, he returned in 1974 to a Peru then ruled by a left-wing military dictatorship. 'I realized I was losing touch with the reality of my country, and above all its language, which for a writer can be deadly,' he said. In 1990, he ran for the presidency of Peru, a reluctant candidate in a nation torn apart by a messianic Maoist guerrilla insurgency and a basket-case, hyperinflation economy. But he was defeated by a then-unknown university rector, Alberto Fujimori, who resolved much of the political and economic chaos but went on to become a corrupt and authoritarian leader in the process. Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Vargas Llosa's longtime friend, later confessed that he had rooted against the writer's candidacy, observing: 'Peru's uncertain gain would be literature's loss. Literature is eternity, politics mere history.' Vargas Llosa also used his literary talents to write several successful novels about the lives of real people, including French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin and his grandmother, Flora Tristan, in 'The Way to Paradise' in 2003 and 19th-century Irish nationalist and diplomat Sir Roger Casement in 'The Dream of the Celt' in 2010. His last published novel was 'Harsh Times' (Tiempos Recios) in 2019 about a U.S.-backed coup d'etat in Guatemala in 1954. He became a member of the Royal Spanish Academy in 1994 and held visiting professor and resident writer posts in more than a dozen colleges and universities across the world. In his teens, Vargas Llosa joined a communist cell and eloped with and later married a 33-year-old Bolivian, Julia Urquidi — the sister-in-law of his uncle. He later drew inspiration from their nine-year marriage to write the hit comic novel 'Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter' (La Tía Julia y el Escribidor). In 1965, he married his first cousin, Patricia Llosa, 10 years his junior, and together they had three children. They divorced 50 years later, and he started a relationship with Spanish society figure Isabel Preysler, former wife of singer Julio Iglesias and mother of singer Enrique Iglesias. They separated in 2022. Vargas Llosa is survived by his children. Their letter announcing his death said his remains will be cremated and there won't be any public ceremony.
NBC News
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- NBC News
Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian author and Nobel literature laureate, dies at 89
LIMA — Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel literature laureate and a giant of Latin American letters, died Sunday. He was 89. He was a prolific author and essayist with such celebrated novels as 'The Time of the Hero' (La Ciudad y los Perros) and 'Feast of the Goat,' and won myriad prizes, including the 2010 Nobel. 'It is with deep sorrow that we announce that our father, Mario Vargas Llosa, passed away peacefully in Lima today, surrounded by his family,' read a letter signed by his children Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana, and posted by Álvaro on X. 'His departure will sadden his relatives, his friends and his readers around the world, but we hope that they will find comfort, as we do, in the fact that he enjoyed a long, adventurous and fruitful life, and leaves behind him a body of work that will outlive him,' they added. The author's lawyer and close friend, Enrique Ghersi, confirmed the death to The Associated Press and recalled the writer's last birthday on March 28 at the home of his daughter, Morgana. 'He spent it happy; his close friends surrounded him, he ate his cake, we joked that day that there were still 89 more years to go, he had a long, fruitful, and free life,' Ghersi said. Latin America's new wave Vargas Llosa published his first collection of stories 'The Cubs and Other Stories' (Los Jefes) in 1959. But he burst onto the literary stage in 1963 with his groundbreaking debut 'The Time of the Hero,' a novel that drew on his experiences at a Peruvian military academy and angered the country's military. A thousand copies were burned by military authorities, with some generals calling the book false and Vargas Llosa a communist. That, and subsequent novels such as 'Conversation in the Cathedral,' (Conversación en la Catedral) in 1969, quickly established Vargas Llosa as one of the leaders of the so-called 'Boom,' or new wave of Latin American writers of the 1960s and 1970s, alongside Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. Vargas Llosa started writing early, and at 15 was a part-time crime reporter for La Crónica newspaper. According to his official website, other jobs he had included revising names on cemetery tombs in Peru, working as a teacher in the Berlitz school in Paris and briefly on the Spanish desk at Agence France-Presse in Paris. He continued publishing articles in the press for most of his life, most notably in a twice-monthly political opinion column titled 'Piedra de Toque' (Touchstones) that was printed in several newspapers. Vargas Llosa came to be a fierce defender of personal and economic liberties, gradually edging away from his communism-linked past, and regularly attacked Latin American leftist leaders he viewed as dictators. Although an early supporter of the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro, he later grew disillusioned and denounced Castro's Cuba. By 1980, he said he no longer believed in socialism as a solution for developing nations. In a famous incident in Mexico City in 1976, Vargas Llosa punched fellow Nobel Prize winner and ex-friend García Márquez, whom he later ridiculed as 'Castro's courtesan.' It was never clear whether the fight was over politics or a personal dispute, as neither writer ever wanted to discuss it publicly. As he slowly turned his political trajectory toward free-market conservatism, Vargas Llosa lost the support of many of his Latin American literary contemporaries and attracted much criticism even from admirers of his work. Pampered early life Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was born March 28, 1936, in Peru's southern city of Arequipa, high in the Andes at the foot of the Misti volcano. His father, Ernesto Vargas Maldonado, left the family before he was born. To avoid public scandal, his mother, Dora Llosa Ureta, took her child to Bolivia, where her father was the Peruvian consul in Cochabamba. Vargas Llosa said his early life was 'somewhat traumatic,' pampered by his mother and grandmother in a large house with servants, his every whim granted. It was not until he was 10, after the family had moved to Peru's coastal city of Piura, that he learned his father was alive. His parents reconciled and the family moved to Peru's capital, Lima. Vargas Llosa described his father as a disciplinarian who viewed his son's love of Jules Verne and writing poetry as surefire routes to starvation, and feared for his 'manhood,' believing that 'poets are always homosexuals.' After failing to get the boy enrolled in a naval academy because he was underage, Vargas Llosa's father sent him to Leoncio Prado Military Academy — an experience that was to stay with Vargas Llosa and led to 'The Time of the Hero.' The book won the Spanish Critics Award. The military academy 'was like discovering hell,' Vargas Llosa said later. He entered Peru's San Marcos University to study literature and law, 'the former as a calling and the latter to please my family, which believed, not without certain cause, that writers usually die of hunger.' After earning his literature degree in 1958 — he didn't bother submitting his final law thesis — Vargas Llosa won a scholarship to pursue a doctorate in Madrid. Vargas Llosa drew much of his inspiration from his Peruvian homeland, but preferred to live abroad, residing for spells each year in Madrid, New York and Paris. His early novels revealed a Peruvian world of military arrogance and brutality, of aristocratic decadence, and of Stone Age Amazon Indians existing simultaneously with 20th-century urban blight. 'Peru is a kind of incurable illness and my relationship to it is intense, harsh and full of the violence of passion,' Vargas Llosa wrote in 1983. After 16 years in Europe, he returned in 1974 to a Peru then ruled by a left-wing military dictatorship. 'I realized I was losing touch with the reality of my country, and above all its language, which for a writer can be deadly,' he said. In 1990, he ran for the presidency of Peru, a reluctant candidate in a nation torn apart by a messianic Maoist guerrilla insurgency and a basket-case, hyperinflation economy. But he was defeated by a then-unknown university rector, Alberto Fujimori, who resolved much of the political and economic chaos but went on to become a corrupt and authoritarian leader in the process. Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Vargas Llosa's longtime friend, later confessed that he had rooted against the writer's candidacy, observing: 'Peru's uncertain gain would be literature's loss. Literature is eternity, politics mere history.' Vargas Llosa also used his literary talents to write several successful novels about the lives of real people, including French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin and his grandmother, Flora Tristan, in 'The Way to Paradise' in 2003 and 19th-century Irish nationalist and diplomat Sir Roger Casement in 'The Dream of the Celt' in 2010. His last published novel was 'Harsh Times' (Tiempos Recios) in 2019 about a U.S.-backed coup d'etat in Guatemala in 1954. He became a member of the Royal Spanish Academy in 1994 and held visiting professor and resident writer posts in more than a dozen colleges and universities across the world. In his teens, Vargas Llosa joined a communist cell and eloped with and later married a 33-year-old Bolivian, Julia Urquidi — the sister-in-law of his uncle. He later drew inspiration from their nine-year marriage to write the hit comic novel 'Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter' (La Tía Julia y el Escribidor). In 1965, he married his first cousin, Patricia Llosa, 10 years his junior, and together they had three children. They divorced 50 years later, and he started a relationship with Spanish society figure Isabel Preysler, former wife of singer Julio Iglesias and mother of singer Enrique Iglesias. They separated in 2022. Vargas Llosa is survived by his children.
CBS News
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian author and Nobel literature laureate, dies at the age of 89
Lima, Peru — Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel literature laureate and a giant of Latin American letters, died Sunday. He was 89. He was a prolific author and essayist with such celebrated novels as "The Time of the Hero" (La Ciudad y los Perros) and "Feast of the Goat," and won myriad prizes. The Nobel committee said it awarded him in 2010 "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." "It is with deep sorrow that we announce that our father, Mario Vargas Llosa, passed away peacefully in Lima today, surrounded by his family," read a letter signed by his children Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana, and posted by Álvaro on X. "His departure will sadden his relatives, his friends and his readers around the world, but we hope that they will find comfort, as we do, in the fact that he enjoyed a long, adventurous and fruitful life, and leaves behind him a body of work that will outlive him," they added. The author's lawyer and close friend, Enrique Ghersi, confirmed the death to The Associated Press and recalled the writer's last birthday on March 28 at the home of his daughter, Morgana. "He spent it happy; his close friends surrounded him, he ate his cake, we joked that day that there were still 89 more years to go, he had a long, fruitful, and free life," Ghersi said. Vargas Llosa published his first collection of stories "The Cubs and Other Stories" (Los Jefes) in 1959. But he burst onto the literary stage in 1963 with his groundbreaking debut "The Time of the Hero," a novel that drew on his experiences at a Peruvian military academy and angered the country's military. A thousand copies were burned by military authorities, with some generals calling the book false and Vargas Llosa a communist. That, and subsequent novels such as "Conversation in the Cathedral," (Conversación en la Catedral) in 1969, quickly established Vargas Llosa as one of the leaders of the so-called "Boom," or new wave of Latin American writers of the 1960s and 1970s, alongside Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. Vargas Llosa started writing early, and at 15 was a part-time crime reporter for La Crónica newspaper. According to his official website, other jobs he had included revising names on cemetery tombs in Peru, working as a teacher in the Berlitz school in Paris and briefly on the Spanish desk at Agence France-Presse in Paris. He continued publishing articles in the press for most of his life, most notably in a twice-monthly political opinion column titled "Piedra de Toque" (Touchstones) that was printed in several newspapers. Vargas Llosa came to be a fierce defender of personal and economic liberties, gradually edging away from his communism-linked past, and regularly attacked Latin American leftist leaders he viewed as dictators. Although an early supporter of the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro, he later grew disillusioned and denounced Castro's Cuba. By 1980, he said he no longer believed in socialism as a solution for developing nations. In a famous incident in Mexico City in 1976, Vargas Llosa punched fellow Nobel Prize winner and ex-friend García Márquez, whom he later ridiculed as "Castro's courtesan." It was never clear whether the fight was over politics or a personal dispute, as neither writer ever wanted to discuss it publicly. As he slowly turned his political trajectory toward free-market conservatism, Vargas Llosa lost the support of many of his Latin American literary contemporaries and attracted much criticism even from admirers of his work. Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was born March 28, 1936, in Peru's southern city of Arequipa, high in the Andes at the foot of the Misti volcano. His father, Ernesto Vargas Maldonado, left the family before he was born. To avoid public scandal, his mother, Dora Llosa Ureta, took her child to Bolivia, where her father was the Peruvian consul in Cochabamba. Vargas Llosa said his early life was "somewhat traumatic," pampered by his mother and grandmother in a large house with servants, his every whim granted. It was not until he was 10, after the family had moved to Peru's coastal city of Piura, that he learned his father was alive. His parents reconciled and the family moved to Peru's capital, Lima. Vargas Llosa described his father as a disciplinarian who viewed his son's love of Jules Verne and writing poetry as surefire routes to starvation, and feared for his "manhood," believing that "poets are always homosexuals." After failing to get the boy enrolled in a naval academy because he was underage, Vargas Llosa's father sent him to Leoncio Prado Military Academy - an experience that was to stay with Vargas Llosa and led to "The Time of the Hero." The book won the Spanish Critics Award. The military academy "was like discovering hell," Vargas Llosa said later. He entered Peru's San Marcos University to study literature and law, "the former as a calling and the latter to please my family, which believed, not without certain cause, that writers usually die of hunger." After earning his literature degree in 1958 - he didn't bother submitting his final law thesis - Vargas Llosa won a scholarship to pursue a doctorate in Madrid. Vargas Llosa drew much of his inspiration from his Peruvian homeland, but preferred to live abroad, residing for spells each year in Madrid, New York and Paris. His early novels revealed a Peruvian world of military arrogance and brutality, of aristocratic decadence, and of Stone Age Amazon Indians existing simultaneously with 20th-century urban blight. "Peru is a kind of incurable illness and my relationship to it is intense, harsh and full of the violence of passion," Vargas Llosa wrote in 1983. After 16 years in Europe, he returned in 1974 to a Peru then ruled by a left-wing military dictatorship. "I realized I was losing touch with the reality of my country, and above all its language, which for a writer can be deadly," he said. In 1990, he ran for the presidency of Peru, a reluctant candidate in a nation torn apart by a messianic Maoist guerrilla insurgency and a basket-case, hyperinflation economy. But he was defeated by a then-unknown university rector, Alberto Fujimori, who resolved much of the political and economic chaos but went on to become a corrupt and authoritarian leader in the process. Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Vargas Llosa's longtime friend, later confessed that he had rooted against the writer's candidacy, observing: "Peru's uncertain gain would be literature's loss. Literature is eternity, politics mere history." Vargas Llosa also used his literary talents to write several successful novels about the lives of real people, including French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin and his grandmother, Flora Tristan, in "The Way to Paradise" in 2003 and 19th-century Irish nationalist and diplomat Sir Roger Casement in "The Dream of the Celt" in 2010. His last published novel was "Harsh Times" (Tiempos Recios) in 2019 about a U.S.-backed coup d'etat in Guatemala in 1954. He became a member of the Royal Spanish Academy in 1994 and held visiting professor and resident writer posts in more than a dozen colleges and universities across the world. In his teens, Vargas Llosa joined a communist cell and eloped with and later married a 33-year-old Bolivian, Julia Urquidi - the sister-in-law of his uncle. He later drew inspiration from their nine-year marriage to write the hit comic novel "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" (La Tía Julia y el Escribidor). In 1965, he married his first cousin, Patricia Llosa, 10 years his junior, and together they had three children. They divorced 50 years later, and he started a relationship with Spanish society figure Isabel Preysler, former wife of singer Julio Iglesias and mother of singer Enrique Iglesias. They separated in 2022. Vargas Llosa is survived by his children. Their letter announcing his death said his remains will be cremated and there won't be any public ceremony.
