Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, a Nobel laureate for literature and one of the central figures of Latin American literature, died at the age of 89, his family announced.
Mario Vargas Llosa died at the age of 89 photo archive
His death, which occurred on Sunday, was announced by a statement by his children, Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana Vargas Llosa.
Throughout a career that has spread over 50 years old, Vargas Llosa has explored the theme of power and corruption in a series of novels, including Hero’s time, Conversation to the cathedral and The holiday of the goataccording to The Guardian.
His life was as colorful as his fiction: Vargas Llosa launched a failed candidacy for Peru’s presidency, maintained a long -term conflict with Gabriel García Márquez and was a Nobel laureate in 2010.
Born in Arequipa, in 1936, Vargas started working as an investigation reporter at just 15 years old. Four years later, he ran with his aunt through the Alliance, Julia Urquidi, who was 32 years old – a gesture that his father named “A virile act”.
In 1963 his first novel, Hero timewas published in Spain. But this story about a crime spent at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy – where Vargas Llosa has studied for two years in adolescence – and about subsequent mammalization was considered so shocking in Peru that it is said that 1,000 copies were burned in the school yard.
Vargas Llosa was in the center of the Latin American literature boom, along with writers such as Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes and Márquez. As his public profile increased, Vargas Llosa was increasingly involved in politics. He distanced himself from the Marxism of his youth, hosted a television show in Peru and, in 1984, refused the offer of Conservative President Fernando Belaúnde Terry to become prime minister.
In 1987, Vargas Llosa gathered a lot of 120,000 people at a rally in Lima, protesting against the nationalization of the Peruvian financial system, and launched his candidacy for the presidency. Three years later, after numerous abusive calls and death threats, he was defeated in the second round by Alberto Fujimori and left the country in a few hours.
Vargas Llosa obtained Spanish citizenship in 1993, continuing to write plays, essays and novels. The holiday of the goat, published in 2000, entered the mind of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, with a disturbing effect. His novel from 2006, the bad girl, follows an intermittent love story for over 40 years.
When the Swedish Academy contacted in 2010, Vargas Llosa initially thought it was a joke. Nobel Prize was “A fairy tale of one week”declared for The Guardian in 2012 but “A nightmare for one year”, public attention being so great that he could barely write: “You can’t even imagine the pressure to interview, to go to book fairs.”
The laureate used his new global platform to denounce the manipulation of the Peruvian press, the propaganda of the Russian Federation and Donald Trump. However, in May 2022, he said he would support the former far -right leader in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, in front of Luiz Ináio Lula Da Silva, in the general elections.
Despite his international profile, Vargas Llosa continued to write fiction, publishing four novels after receiving the Nobel. In 2023 he announced that his new novel Le Dedico Mi Silencio (I dedicate my silence) It will be the last, declaring for La Vanguardia: “Although I am an optimist, I do not think I will live enough to work at a new novel, especially since it takes me three or four years to write one. But I will never stop working and I hope to have the power to continue until the end.”
Vargas Llosa divorced his first wife in 1964 and married his primary cousin, Patricia Llosa, the mother of Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana. After 50 years of marriage, he left her in 2015 for Isabel Preysler, the mother of singer Enrique Iglesias, a relationship that ended in 2022.
