Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian author and Nobel literature laureate, dies
at 89
[April 14, 2025]
By FRANKLIN BRICEÑO and CIARÁN GILES
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.
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.
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Writer Mario Vargas Llosa speaks to reporters in New York, Oct. 7,
2010. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)
 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.
___
Giles reported from Madrid.
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