Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa (28 March 1936 – 13 April 2025) was a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist, and politician. Vargas Llosa was one of the most significant Latin American novelists and essayists and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a more substantial international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. In 2010, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for "his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat". Vargas Llosa rose to international fame in the 1960s with novels such as The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros, 1963/1966), The Green House (La casa verde, 1965/1968), and the monumental Conversation in The Cathedral (Conversación en La Catedral, 1969/1975). He wrote prolifically across various literary genres, including literary criticism and journalism. His novels include comedies, murder mysteries, historical novels, and political thrillers. He won the 1967 Rómulo Gallegos Prize and the 1986 Prince of Asturias Award. Several of his works have been adopted as feature films, such as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973/1978) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977/1982). Vargas Llosa's perception of Peruvian society and his experiences as a native Peruvian influenced many of his works. Increasingly, he expanded his range and tackled themes from other parts of the world. In his essays, Vargas Llosa criticized nationalism in different parts of the world. Like many Latin American writers, Vargas Llosa was politically active. While he initially supported the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, Vargas Llosa later became disenchanted with its policies, particularly after the imprisonment of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971, and later identified as a classical liberal and held anti–left-wing ideas. He ran for the presidency of Peru with the centre-right Democratic Front coalition in the 1990 election, advocating for liberal reforms, but lost the election to Alberto Fujimori in a landslide. Vargas Llosa continued his literary career while advocating for right-wing activists and candidates internationally following his exit from direct participation in Peruvian politics. He was awarded the 1994 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1995 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 2012 Carlos Fuentes Prize, and the 2018 Pablo Neruda Order of Artistic and Cultural Merit. In 2011, Vargas Llosa was made Marquess of Vargas Llosa by the Spanish king Juan Carlos I. In 2021, he was elected to the Académie Française.
Early life and family
Mario Vargas Llosa was born to a middle-class family on 28 March 1936, in the southern Peruvian provincial city of Arequipa. He was the only child of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Llosa Ureta (the former a radio operator in an aviation company, the latter the daughter of an old criollo family), who separated a few months before his birth. Shortly after Mario's birth, his father revealed that he was in a relationship with a German woman, from which Mario's two younger half-brothers—Enrique and Ernesto Vargas—were born. Vargas Llosa lived with his maternal family in Arequipa until a year after his parents divorced, when his maternal grandfather was named honorary consul for Peru in Bolivia. With his mother and her family, Vargas Llosa then moved to Cochabamba, Bolivia, where he spent the early years of his childhood. His maternal family, the Llosas, were sustained by his grandfather, who managed a cotton farm. As a child, Vargas Llosa was led to believe that his father had died—his mother and her family did not want to explain that his parents had separated. During the government of President José Bustamante y Rivero, Vargas Llosa's maternal grandfather, who was a cousin of Bustamante y Rivero, obtained a diplomatic post in the northern Peruvian coastal city of Piura and the entire family returned to Peru. While in Piura, Vargas Llosa attended elementary school at the Colegio Salesiano religious academy. In 1946, at the age of ten, he moved to Lima and met his father for the first time. His parents re-established their relationship and lived in Magdalena del Mar, a middle-class Lima suburb, during his teenage years. While in Lima, he studied at the Colegio La Salle, a Catholic middle school, from 1947 to 1949. When Vargas Llosa was fourteen, his father sent him to the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Callao. At the age of 16, before his graduation, Vargas Llosa began working as a journalist for local newspapers. He withdrew from the military academy and finished his studies in Piura, where he worked for the local newspaper, La Industria, and witnessed the theatrical performance of his first dramatic work, La huida del Inca. In 1953, during the government of Manuel A. Odría, Vargas Llosa enrolled in Lima's National University of San Marcos, to study law and literature. While at the university, he was a member of a communist group, embracing the ideology as a reaction to the corruption and inequality endemic to Latin America. He married Julia Urquidi, his maternal uncle's sister-in-law, in 1955 at the age of 19; she was 10 years older. Vargas Llosa began his literary career in earnest, in 1957, with the publication of his first short stories, "The Leaders" ("Los jefes") and "The Grandfather" ("El abuelo"), while working for two Peruvian newspapers. Upon his graduation from the National University of San Marcos in 1958, he received a scholarship to study at the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain. In 1960, after his scholarship in Madrid had expired, Vargas Llosa moved to France, under the impression that he would receive a scholarship to study there. However, upon arriving in Paris, he learned that his scholarship request had been denied. Despite Mario and Julia's unexpected financial status, the couple decided to remain in Paris, where he began to write prolifically, including as a ghostwriter. Their marriage lasted only a few more years before ending in divorce in 1964. A year later, Vargas Llosa married his first cousin, Patricia Llosa, with whom he had three children: Álvaro (born 1966), a writer and editor; Gonzalo (born 1967), an international civil servant; and Morgana (born 1974), a photographer.
Writing career
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