Mario Vargas Llosa

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa (28 March 1936 – 13 April 2025), was a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist, and politician. A major figure among Latin American novelists and essayists, he is often ranked as the writer of his generation with the greatest international reach and readership, surpassing even other authors of the Latin American Boom. The Nobel Prize in Literature came to him in 2010, with the Swedish Academy citing "his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat."

His international reputation took off in the 1960s with novels like *The Time of the Hero* (1963/1966), *The Green House* (1965/1968), and the sprawling *Conversation in The Cathedral* (1969/1975). Across his career, he worked in many genres—literary criticism, journalism, comedies, murder mysteries, historical novels, and political thrillers. The Rómulo Gallegos Prize came his way in 1967, and the Prince of Asturias Award in 1986. Several of his books were turned into feature films, among them *Captain Pantoja and the Special Service* (1973/1978) and *Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter* (1977/1982). His own background as a native Peruvian shaped much of his fiction, though he later broadened his scope to tackle subjects from other parts of the world. In his essays, he took aim at nationalism in various countries.

Like many Latin American writers, Vargas Llosa was deeply involved in politics. He initially backed Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution, but grew disillusioned after the 1971 imprisonment of poet Heberto Padilla. Over time, he identified as a classical liberal and held anti–left-wing views. In 1990, he ran for president of Peru as the candidate of the centre-right Democratic Front, pushing for liberal reforms, but lost heavily to Alberto Fujimori.

After stepping back from direct political involvement in Peru, he kept writing and continued to support right-wing activists and candidates internationally. His honors include the Miguel de Cervantes Prize (1994), the Jerusalem Prize (1995), the Nobel Prize in Literature (2010), the Carlos Fuentes Prize (2012), and the Pablo Neruda Order of Artistic and Cultural Merit (2018). In 2011, King Juan Carlos I of Spain made him Marquess of Vargas Llosa. He was elected to the Académie Française in 2021.

**Early life and family**

Mario Vargas Llosa was born on 28 March 1936 in Arequipa, a provincial city in southern Peru, into a middle-class family. He was the only child of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado, a radio operator for an aviation company, and Dora Llosa Ureta, who came from an old criollo family. His parents had separated a few months before his birth. Shortly after Mario was born, his father revealed he was in a relationship with a German woman, who later gave birth to Mario’s two younger half-brothers, Enrique and Ernesto Vargas.

For the first year after his parents’ divorce, Vargas Llosa lived with his mother’s family in Arequipa. Then his maternal grandfather was named honorary consul for Peru in Bolivia, and the family—including Mario and his mother—moved to Cochabamba, Bolivia, where he spent his early childhood. The Llosas were supported by his grandfather, who managed a cotton farm. As a child, Vargas Llosa was told his father had died; his mother and her relatives chose not to explain the separation. During the presidency of José Bustamante y Rivero, his maternal grandfather—a cousin of the president—received a diplomatic post in the northern Peruvian coastal city of Piura, and the whole family returned to Peru. In Piura, Vargas Llosa attended elementary school at the Colegio Salesiano religious academy. At age ten, in 1946, he moved to Lima and met his father for the first time. His parents reconciled, and the family lived in Magdalena del Mar, a middle-class Lima suburb, through his teenage years. From 1947 to 1949, he studied at Colegio La Salle, a Catholic middle school in Lima.

When Vargas Llosa was fourteen, his father sent him to the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Callao. At sixteen, before graduating, he started working as a journalist for local newspapers. He left the military academy, finished his studies in Piura, worked for the local paper *La Industria*, and saw the theatrical debut of his first dramatic work, *La huida del Inca*.

In 1953, under the government of Manuel A. Odría, he enrolled at Lima’s National University of San Marcos to study law and literature. While there, he joined a communist group, drawn to the ideology as a reaction to the corruption and inequality widespread in Latin America. In 1955, at age nineteen, he married Julia Urquidi, his maternal uncle’s sister-in-law; she was ten years older. His literary career began in earnest in 1957 with the publication of his first short stories, “The Leaders” and “The Grandfather,” while he worked for two Peruvian newspapers. After graduating from San Marcos in 1958, he received a scholarship to study at the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain.

In 1960, once his Madrid scholarship ended, Vargas Llosa moved to France, believing he had a scholarship to study there. Upon arriving in Paris, he learned the request had been denied. Despite this unexpected financial hardship, he and Julia decided to stay.