Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa was a Peruvian novelist, essayist and public intellectual, born in Arequipa on 28 March 1936. He later also held Spanish citizenship, and he died on 13 April 2025. He became one of the leading figures of the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s, alongside writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar.

His fiction ranges from savage portraits of military and political life to comic, playful stories and historical novels set across Latin America. He drew often on his own experiences in Peru, and he was also a vigorous critic and political commentator. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. Readers value him for his ambitious narrative structures, his interest in how power shapes ordinary lives, and his belief in the force of storytelling.