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Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the pivotal figures who ignited a global boom in Latin American literature, has died aged 89.
His death on Sunday was announced in a statement from his children, Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana Vargas Llosa.
Over a career that spanned more than 50 years, Vargas Llosa charted power and corruption in a series of novels including The Time of the Hero, Conversation in the Cathedral and The Feast of the Goat. Living a life that was as colourful as his fiction, Vargas Llosa also launched a failed bid for the Peruvian presidency, nursed a long-running feud with Gabriel García Márquez and triumphed as a Nobel laureate in 2010.
Born in Arequipa in 1936, Vargas started working as a crime reporter when he was just 15. Four years later, he eloped with his 32-year-old aunt by marriage, Julia Urquidi, a departure his father called a “virile act”. A trip to Paris in 1958 was the beginning of 16 years abroad, living in Madrid, Barcelona and London as well as the French capital. But while working as a journalist, broadcaster and teacher, Vargas Llosa began to return to his homeland in fiction.
In 1963 his first novel, The Time of the Hero, was published in Spain. But this story of a murder at the Leoncio Prado military academy – where Vargas Llosa spent two years as a teenager – and the subsequent cover-up was deemed so shocking in Peru that it is said that 1,000 copies were burned on the school’s parade ground.
Vargas Llosa found himself at the centre of a boom in Latin American literature alongside writers such as Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes and Márquez. His 1971 study, Garcia Márquez: Story of a Deicide, brought the literature of the new world into conversation with the old, but his friendship with the novelist didn’t last. When Márquez greeted Vargas Llosa outside a Mexico City cinema in 1976, he received a punch to the face in reply. Speaking at an event in Madrid, three years after Márquez died in 2014, Vargas Llosa said he was sad to hear of his former friend’s death but refused to elaborate on the reasons for the feud. “We’re moving toward dangerous ground,” he said. “The time has come to put an end to this conversation.”
Plays, short stories and novels including Conversation in the Cathedral, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, and The War of the End of the World confirmed his literary reputation. But as his profile grew, Vargas Llosa became increasingly involved in politics. Moving away from the Marxism of his youth, he hosted a chatshow on Peruvian television and, in 1984, turned down an offer from the conservative president Fernando Belaúnde Terry to become his prime minister.
In 1987 Vargas Llosa drew a crowd of 120,000 to a rally in Lima protesting plans to nationalise the Peruvian financial system, and launched a presidential campaign. Three years later, after many abusive phone calls and death threats, he was defeated in the second round by Alberto Fujimori and left the country within hours.
“I didn’t lie,” he told the Guardian in 2002. “I said we needed radical reforms and social sacrifices, and in the beginning it worked. But then came the dirty war, presenting my reforms as something that would destroy jobs. It was very effective, especially with the poorest of society. In Latin America we prefer promises to reality.”
Vargas Llosa took up Spanish citizenship in 1993, as the stream of plays, essays and novels continued. The Feast of the Goat, published in 2000, entered the mind of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo to chilling effect. His 2006 novel The Bad Girl follows an on-off affair that spans more than 40 years.
When the Swedish Academy called in 2010, Vargas Llosa at first thought it was a joke. The Nobel prize was “a fairytale for a week” he told the Guardian in 2012, but “a nightmare for a year”, the public attention leaving him barely able to write: “You can’t imagine the pressure to give interviews, to go to book fairs.”
The laureate used his new global platform to speak out against manipulation in the Peruvian media, propaganda from the Russian Federation and Donald Trump. However, in May 2022 he said that he would be backing Brazil’s far-right former leader Jair Bolsonaro over Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil’s general election. Though the former president’s “clowning around” is “very difficult for a liberal to accept”, he explained that “between Bolsonaro and Lula, I of course prefer Bolsonaro. Even with Bolsonaro’s foolishness, he’s not Lula.”
“I learned from my political experiences that I am a writer, not a politician,” Vargas Llosa explained to the Guardian in 2012. “Part of the reasons I have lived the life I have is because I wanted to have an adventurous life. But my best adventures are more literary than political.”
From 1976 until 1979, Vargas Llosa served as president of PEN International, the worldwide writers’ freedom of expression group. Due to his objection to the Catalan independence movement, he resigned as emeritus president in 2019 after the organisation called for the release of two jailed Catalan civil society leaders and claimed Catalans had been persecuted “in a way not seen since the Franco dictatorship”.
Despite the author’s international profile, he carried on making space for fiction, with four novels appearing after the Nobel prize. In 2023, he announced his newest novel Le dedico mi silencio (I Give You My Silence) would be his last, telling La Vanguardia, “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. But I’ll never stop working and I hope that I’ll have the strength to carry on until the end.”
Vargas Llosa divorced his first wife in 1964 and married his first cousin, Patricia Llosa, mother to 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.
