Peruvian novelist and Nobel literature laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, a former leftist writer who turned to more conservative causes and once ran for president in Peru, has died. He was 89.
The big picture: Vargas Llosa is the last major surviving member of Latin America’s 20th Century literary Boom generation — writers who mostly used magical realism to critique society and often wrote from exile.
Driving the news: His children, Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana Vargas Llosa, announced his death in a social media statement, which said he died peacefully on Sunday in Lima, Peru.
Zoom out: Vargas Llosa came onto the literary scene with his first book, “The Time of the Hero” (“La ciudad y los perros”), in 1963, but it was his second novel, “The Green House” (“La casa verde”), that earned him international praise.
- Along with Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, Vargas Llosa helped shape the Latin American literary canon with sharp critiques of society through examinations of race, authoritarianism, displacement and sexuality.
- He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”
The intrigue: In 2023, Vargas Llosa wrote in the postscript of his last book, “Le dedico mi silencio” (“I Give You My Silence”), that he was done writing novels after more than 60 years.
- “I think I’ve finished this book. I’d now like to write an essay on (Jean-Paul) Sartre, who was my teacher as a young man. It will be the last thing I write,” he wrote.
- His final novel is a love letter to Peru and a homage to the nation’s música criolla.
- “I’m 87 and, 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,” Vargas Llosa said to La Vanguardia, a newspaper in Barcelona, Spain.
Flashback: Vargas Llosa ran unsuccessfully as a candidate in Peru’s 1990 presidential election.
- Over the years, he shifted from a supporter of leftist causes to a leader of the center-right party Movimiento Libertad and supported other conservative movements.