14-04-2025
Nobel-winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa dies at 89
Peruvian novelist and Nobel literature laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, a former leftist writer who turned to more conservative causes and once ran for president in Peru, has died. He was 89.
The big picture: Vargas Llosa is the last major surviving member of Latin America's 20th Century literary Boom generation — writers who mostly used magical realism to critique society and often wrote from exile.
Driving the news: His children, Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana Vargas Llosa, announced his death in a social media statement, which said he died peacefully on Sunday in Lima, Peru.
Zoom out: Vargas Llosa came onto the literary scene with his first book, "The Time of the Hero" ("La ciudad y los perros"), in 1963, but it was his second novel, "The Green House" ("La casa verde"), that earned him international praise.
Along with Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, Vargas Llosa helped shape the Latin American literary canon with sharp critiques of society through examinations of race, authoritarianism, displacement and sexuality.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat."
The intrigue: In 2023, Vargas Llosa wrote in the postscript of his last book, "Le dedico mi silencio" ("I Give You My Silence"), that he was done writing novels after more than 60 years.
"I think I've finished this book. I'd now like to write an essay on (Jean-Paul) Sartre, who was my teacher as a young man. It will be the last thing I write," he wrote.
His final novel is a love letter to Peru and a homage to the nation's música criolla.
"I'm 87 and, although I'm an optimist, I don't think I'll live long enough to work on a new novel, especially because it takes me three or four years to write one," Vargas Llosa said to La Vanguardia, a newspaper in Barcelona, Spain.
Flashback: Vargas Llosa ran unsuccessfully as a candidate in Peru's 1990 presidential election.
