Nobel Prize Winner Mario Vargas Llosa Dies Aged 89

One of the giants of Spanish literature, the Peruvian born author and Nobel prize winner, Mario Vargas Llosa, had died aged 89, in his native Peru.

The writer was given Spanish nationality in 1993.

‘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.

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’.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez sent out his condolences to the writer’s friends and family, tweeting ‘Spanish literature bids farewell to Mario Vargas Llosa, a universal master of words. My gratitude as a reader for an immense body of work, for so many key books for understanding our times.’

The writer’s ‘intellectual genius and enormous body of work will remain an enduring legacy for future generations’, Peru’s President Dina Boluarte posted on X.

Former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe called Vargas Llosa a ‘Master of Masters’.

US Deputy State Secretary Christopher Landau said that ‘to label him as just Peruvian would be a disservice because his themes and interests were timeless and universal’.

‘He will live on in my bookshelves and many others in Latin America and around the world,’ Landau wrote on X.

Vargas Llosa 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 a myriad of prizes.

‘The Time of the Hero’ 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, along with Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez and Argentina’s Julio Cortazar.

The Nobel committee had said in 2010 that it was awarding him ‘for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat’.

After failing to get him 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 later 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’.

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.

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 then 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.

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.