Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa was a Peruvian-Spanish novelist, essayist, and politician whose dense narrative experiments and sweeping social canvases helped define the Latin American Boom of the 1960s. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010.

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was born on March 28, 1936, in Arequipa, Peru, to Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Llosa Ureta. His parents separated before his birth, and he was raised by his mother and her family in Cochabamba, Bolivia, before returning to Peru. He attended the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, an experience that supplied material for his fiction, and went on to study literature and law at the National University of San Marcos. A doctorate followed at the Complutense University of Madrid in 1958.

His debut novel, The Time of the Hero, appeared in 1963 and drew on his cadet years; the Peruvian military burned a thousand copies. The Green House followed in 1966 and Conversation in the Cathedral in 1969, sealing his place among the Boom novelists alongside García Márquez, Cortázar, and Fuentes.

He continued to publish through the next five decades, including The War of the End of the World, The Feast of the Goat, and The Bad Girl. He ran for the Peruvian presidency in 1990, losing to Alberto Fujimori, and later took Spanish citizenship. He died in Lima on April 13, 2025, aged 89.

The masculine name Mario is the Italian and Spanish form of the Latin Marius, an old Roman family name of uncertain etymology, sometimes connected with the war god Mars. He carried that combative spirit into both his novels and his political life.