Mario Vargas Llosa

For other uses, see Mario Vargas Llosa (disambiguation).

Mario Vargas Llosa Marquis of Vargas Llosa
Vargas Llosa in 2016
Born	Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa (1936-03-28)March 28, 1936 Arequipa (Peru)
Died	April 13, 2025(2025-04-13) (aged 89) Lima (Peru)
Cause of death	Pneumonia
Education	Licentiate in Law and Philosophy Doctorate in Philosophy and Letters
Alma mater	National University of San Marcos Complutense University of Madrid (postgraduate)
Occupation	Writer
Spouse(s)	Julia Urquidi Illanes ​ ​ (m. 1955; div. 1964)​ Patricia Llosa ​ ​ (m. 1965; div. 2015)​
Partner	Isabel Preysler (2015–2022)
Children	Álvaro Vargas Llosa (b. 1966) Gonzalo Vargas Llosa (b. 1967) Morgana Vargas Llosa (b. 1974)
Parent(s)	Ernesto Vargas Maldonado Dora Llosa Ureta
Writing career
Language	Spanish
Period	1959–2025
Genres	Novel short story essay article drama
Notable awards	See separate list
Movement	Political liberalism
Member of the Royal Spanish Academy Seat "L"
In office January 15, 1996 – April 13, 2025
Preceded by	Juan Rof Carballo
Succeeded by	Vacant
Personal details
Party	Liberty Movement (1987–1993) Popular Liberty (2023–2025)
Signature

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa (Arequipa, March 28, 1936 – Lima, April 13, 2025), Marquis of Vargas Llosa, was a Peruvian writer with Spanish nationality from 1993 and Dominican nationality from June 2022.

Considered one of the most important contemporary novelists and essayists, his works have won numerous awards, most notably the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 1994 Cervantes Prize, the 1986 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, the 1962 Biblioteca Breve Prize, the 1967 Rómulo Gallegos Prize and the 1993 Planeta Prize, among others. Along with Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar and Carlos Fuentes, he is one of the central exponents of Hispanic American literature.

He achieved fame in the 1960s with novels such as La ciudad y los perros (1963), La casa verde (1966) and Conversación en La Catedral (1969). He went on to cultivate several literary genres prolifically, such as the essay, the article and the theater. Several of his works have been adapted for film and television. Most of his novels are set in Peru and explore his conception of Peruvian society; by contrast, in La guerra del fin del mundo (1981), La fiesta del Chivo (2000), El sueño del celta (2010) and Tiempos recios (2019) he sets his plots in other countries.

Like other Hispanic American authors, he took part in politics. After sympathizing with communism in his youth, from the 1980s onward he embraced liberalism. He was a candidate for the presidency of Peru in the 1990 elections for the center-right political coalition Democratic Front. He lost the election in the runoff to the candidate of Cambio 90, Alberto Fujimori.

On January 15, 1996, he took possession of seat "L" of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), having been elected in 1994. He already belonged to the Academy of the Language of his country of origin, Peru, but this was no obstacle to his also joining the Spanish Academy by virtue of his status as a Spanish citizen, obtained three years earlier. The writer had lived in Spain for long periods of his life. His acceptance speech was "Las discretas ficciones de Azorín", and it began thus: "Ever since, thirty-five years ago, thanks to a group of doctors from Barcelona who were fond of short stories, I had the joy of seeing my first book published, I have been thanking Spain for something." He was answered by Camilo José Cela.

Fifteen years after joining the Royal Spanish Academy, he was also elected a member of the Académie Française to occupy seat number 18 of that institution, despite never having written works in the French language.

Biography

Dora Llosa Ureta with her son Mario in 1940.

Mario Vargas Llosa was born into a middle class family in Arequipa, in southern Peru, on March 28, 1936. He was the only son of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado (Lima, 1905–1979) and Dora Llosa Ureta (Arequipa, 1914–1995), who separated months before his birth and divorced by mutual agreement after it. On his father's side he was related to the historians Nemesio Vargas Valdivieso and Rubén Vargas Ugarte. Shortly after Mario's birth, his father revealed that he had another relationship with a German woman; from that union were born two younger half-brothers of the writer: Enrique and Ernesto Vargas (the former died of leukemia at the age of eleven; the latter is a lawyer and a U.S. citizen). His father was the only son of Marcelino Vargas and his first wife Zenobia Maldonado, who died in 1925. On his mother's side, he descended from the master of the camp Biscayan Juan de la Llosa y Llaguno, who settled in Arequipa in 1702.

Mario lived with his mother's family in Arequipa until a year after his parents' divorce, in 1937, when his grandfather Pedro J. Llosa Bustamante moved with his whole family to Bolivia, where he had obtained a contract to manage a cotton estate near Cochabamba. In that city he spent the next nine years of his childhood, and there he learned to read and write. He remained there with his mother and his mother's family, and studied up to the fourth grade at the Colegio La Salle. Until the age of ten, he was led to believe that his father had died, since his mother and her family did not want to explain to him that they had separated.

In 1945, when the government of President José Luis Bustamante y Rivero (1945–1948) began in Peru, his grandfather, who was a first cousin of the head of state, obtained the post of Prefect of the Piura Department, so the entire family returned to Peru. Mario's uncles and aunts settled in Lima, while Mario and his mother followed his grandfather to the city of Piura. There Mario continued his primary studies at the Colegio Salesiano Don Bosco.

At the end of 1946 or the beginning of 1947, when he was ten years old, Mario met his father for the first time in Piura. His parents reestablished their relationship and moved to Lima, settling in the middle-class district of Magdalena del Mar. They later moved to La Perla, in Callao, where they lived in a small, isolated house. On weekends Mario used to visit his uncles, aunts and cousins, who lived in the Diego Ferré neighborhood, in the Miraflores District, where he made many friends and where he had his first infatuations. Mario has depicted these places in many of his books as a fond memory.

In Lima he studied at the Colegio La Salle, of the congregation of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, completing the sixth grade of primary school in 1947, and the first two years of secondary school from 1948 to 1949. His relationship with his father, always tortuous, would mark the rest of his life. For years, he harbored mixed feelings toward him, such as fear and resentment, because during his childhood he had to endure violent outbursts from his father, as well as his father's resentment toward the Llosa family and great jealousy regarding his mother, but above all because of his father's revulsion at his literary vocation, which he never came to understand. During his time at the Colegio La Salle, Vargas Llosa suffered an attempted sexual abuse by Brother Leoncio, when that man took him to his room, where he handed him a magazine with naked dancers and began to touch his fly "as if he wanted to masturbate me". After that episode, Vargas Llosa stopped believing in God.

At the age of 14, his father sent him to the Leoncio Prado Military School, in Callao, a boarding school where he completed the third and fourth years of secondary education, between 1950 and 1951. There he endured a harsh military discipline and, according to his own testimony, it was the period in which he read and wrote "as I had never done before", thus consolidating his precocious vocation as a writer. In his novel La ciudad y los perros Vargas Llosa portrays that vivid experience, as well as the discipline to which he was subjected at the military school. His favorite reading was the novels of the French writers Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo. Among his teachers was the surrealist poet César Moro, who for a time taught him French.

During the summer vacation of 1952, Vargas Llosa began working as a journalist at the Lima daily La Crónica, where he was assigned local reports, notes and interviews. That same year he left the military school and moved to Piura, where he lived with his uncle Luis Llosa ("Uncle Lucho") and completed the last year of secondary education at the Colegio San Miguel de Piura. At the same time he worked for the local daily La Industria, and saw the staging of his first dramatic work, La huida del Inca, at the «Variedades» theater.

Bases para una interpretación de Rubén Darío, thesis submitted by Mario Vargas Llosa to his alma mater, the National University of San Marcos (Lima, 1958)

In 1953, during the government of Manuel Odría, Vargas Llosa entered the National University of San Marcos, where he studied Law and Literature. He took part in university politics through Cahuide, the name under which the Peruvian Communist Party was kept alive, at that time persecuted by the government of Manuel Odría (1948–1956), which Vargas Llosa opposed through university bodies and in fleeting protests in the squares of Lima. Shortly afterward he distanced himself from the group and joined the Christian Democrat Party, hoping that this group would launch the candidacy of José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, who at that time was returning from exile. That expectation was not fulfilled. During this time, he worked as an assistant to the renowned San Marcos historian Raúl Porras Barrenechea on a work that never came to fruition: several volumes of a monumental history of the conquest of Peru.

In May 1955, at the age of 19, he married Julia Urquidi Illanes, the sister of his aunt by marriage on his mother's side, who was ten years older than he and already divorced. Because of the rejection this marriage caused in his family, the couple was forced to separate for a time even though they were newlyweds. In order to maintain a life together, the young Mario, helped by Raúl Porras Barrenechea, held up to seven jobs simultaneously: as an assistant librarian at the Club Nacional, writing for several news outlets and even cataloging names from the headstones of the Presbítero Matías Maestro Cemetery in Lima. Eventually he began working as a journalist at Radio Panamericana, substantially increasing his income.

Around that time, Vargas Llosa began his literary career in earnest with the publication of his first stories: El abuelo (in the daily El Comercio, December 9, 1956) and Los jefes (in the magazine Mercurio Peruano, February 1957). At the end of 1957 he entered a short story contest organized by La Revue Française, an important French publication devoted to art. His story titled El desafío won first prize, which consisted of a fifteen-day visit to Paris, where he went in January 1958. His stay in the French capital lasted a month before he returned to Lima. That same year he graduated with a bachelor's degree in Humanities from the National University of San Marcos, on the merit of his thesis on the Bases para una interpretación de Rubén Darío. He was, moreover, considered the most distinguished Literature student at San Marcos, for which he received the Javier Prado scholarship to pursue postgraduate courses at the Complutense University of Madrid, in Spain. Before leaving for Europe, he made a short trip through the Peruvian Amazon, an experience that would later serve him to set three of his novels in that geographical area: La casa verde, Pantaleón y las visitadoras and El hablador.

In 1960, after his scholarship in Madrid ended, Vargas Llosa moved to France believing that he was going to obtain a scholarship to study there. However, once in Paris he learned that his application had been denied. Despite the unexpectedly poor financial situation of Mario and Julia, the couple decided to stay in Paris, where Vargas Llosa began to write prolifically. His marriage lasted a few more years, but ended in divorce in 1964. A year later, Vargas Llosa married his cousin, who was also his first wife's niece on her mother's side, Patricia Llosa Urquidi, daughter of his maternal uncle Luis Llosa Ureta and his wife Olga Urquidi Illanes, daughter of Carlos Urquidi and his wife María del Carmen Illanes; with her he had three children: Álvaro Vargas Llosa (1966), writer and editor; Gonzalo (1967), businessman and representative in the United Kingdom of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); and Morgana (1974), photographer.

In Paris he finished writing his first novel, La ciudad y los perros, and there, through the Hispanist Claude Couffon, he came into contact with Carlos Barral, director of the Spanish publishing house Seix Barral. The novel won the Biblioteca Breve Prize in 1962 and was published the following year by the Barcelona publisher. In 1966, while reading La casa verde, the publishing house's then rights manager, Carmen Balcells, decided to propose to the writer that she become his literary agent. She encouraged him to focus exclusively on literature and secured financial support for him during the time it would take to write Conversación en La Catedral, on the condition that she would handle the contract with the publisher. From that moment on, Balcells became his agent and went on to secure extraordinary contracts for him.

In 1962, he visited revolutionary Cuba as a correspondent during the missile crisis, and in that context expressed sympathy for the revolution, which he considered libertarian in character. His closeness to the Cuban process led him to serve as a juror for the novel prize of the Casa de las Américas in 1965. However, in 1971, after the imprisonment of the poet Heberto Padilla, he publicly broke with the regime of Fidel Castro, marking a turn in his political stance.

In 1971, with the grade of sobresaliente cum laude, he obtained his Doctorate in Philosophy and Letters from the Complutense University of Madrid, under the supervision of Alonso Zamora Vicente, with the thesis García Márquez: lengua y estructura de su obra narrativa, later published as García Márquez: historia de un deicidio. He was a juror at the Cannes Festival in 1976 and, being passionate about soccer, he also worked as a sports journalist during the 1982 World Cup in Spain. In 1983, his ex-wife Julia Urquidi published Lo que Varguitas no dijo, a personal response to the novel La tía Julia y el escribidor, which had been inspired by her relationship with the writer.

In 1994 he was inducted as a member of the Royal Spanish Academy and awarded the Miguel de Cervantes Prize. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages.

In 2015, after appearing in the magazine ¡Hola! together with Isabel Preysler, he confirmed his separation from Patricia Llosa, from whom he finally divorced that same year. In 2019, he resigned from PEN International over his disagreement with its stance on Catalan secessionism.

Final years and death

In April 2022, the writer was admitted to a clinic in Madrid with COVID-19. His son told the press that "thanks to the treatment, his condition is evolving favorably". In October 2023 he published his novel Le dedico mi silencio, with which he marked his retirement from fiction writing. On December 17 of the same year, moreover, he published his last column in the Spanish daily El País, with which he expressly retired from journalism.

Although the author had lived in Madrid since 1990, he frequently traveled to Peru for various events or for personal or family visits. During his last years, he decided to settle in his residence in the Barranco District (Lima). In addition, accompanied by his children, he toured the places where some of his works were set, such as the now-vanished bar La Catedral, Cinco Esquinas or the Quinta Heeren in Barrios Altos.

He died on Sunday, April 13, 2025, at the age of 89 at his residence in Barranco, a district of Lima, from pneumonia. Shortly afterward, a relative revealed that the pneumonia was a direct consequence of his having contracted COVID-19 in 2022.

His wake and subsequent cremation took place the day after his death in strict privacy.

On April 15, the well-known Peruvian journalist Jaime Bayly stated that in 2024 he had been informed that Vargas Llosa was probably suffering from an incurable blood cancer and speculated that this might have contributed to his death. A day earlier, the Spanish writer Juan Jesús Armas Marcelo asserted that the family of the Peruvian Nobel laureate had been expecting his death since Saturday the 12th and that the two COVID infections "made the treatment of the leukemia he suffered from very difficult". Nevertheless, his son Álvaro Vargas Llosa ruled out that his father had died of leukemia, saying rather that he "had... very low defenses that made him prone to infections of all kinds. In the final stage he also had heart failure. Sooner or later we knew that some infection would come that would overcome his resistance. The last pneumonia wreaked havoc on him and was definitive". He also related that in his final moments some relatives sang música criolla to him and that when he was semi-conscious "we took turns reading aloud to him. And we played music for him, above all sonatas by Beethoven, compositions by Mahler", and that Vargas Llosa was aware that death was near, although he neither clung on nor surrendered easily to it.

Key aspects of his work

Mario Vargas Llosa in 1986.

Characteristics

Mario Vargas Llosa has been described as one of the most complete narrators of his generation and a prominent figure of Hispanic American literature.

From a thematic point of view, his novels deal with the antinomy between the historical and the structural, as expressed in the titles of several of his novels (La ciudad y los perros, La casa verde, Conversación en La Catedral), in which the presence of structures demonstrates the almost obsessive interest the author has in them. Likewise, as regards tone, his work displays the most varied characteristics, ranging from humor, love and comedy to tragic downfall.

On the other hand, the fact that the bulk of his literary output was produced abroad explains the retrospective bent that dominates a good part of it, as well as his constant reconstruction of intimate or collective experiences of Peru as the basis of his fiction, with some exceptions such as La guerra del fin del mundo and some of his later novels.

As for his literary models, or "precursors" (to whom in several cases he has devoted critical studies), one must cite, on the one hand, the novel of chivalry Tirant lo Blanch, by Joanot Martorell, and Cien años de soledad, by García Márquez, both as ideals of the concept of the total novel (one that fuses the real with the irrational and myth); on the other, two writers in particular are indispensable for Vargas Llosa: Gustave Flaubert, as a model of literature as a vocation, of the use of reality as a bottomless well in which to find content and themes (the mediocrity of the human being, violence and sex), and also as a model of the importance of a rigorous narrative structure and of a narrator impassive before the events narrated; and William Faulkner, both with regard to themes and settings and to formal features, especially multiple perspectives, leaps in time, the use of several narrators instead of an omniscient one, the withholding of information, and the use of parallel stories.

Beginnings

Vargas Llosa's literary beginnings were the premiere in Piura, when he was 16, of a play, now probably lost, titled La huida del Inca, and a few short stories published in various outlets in Lima. In Lima, the dominant literary presence was that of the narrators of the so-called Generation of '50. Although he would eventually distance himself from them, the group stimulated his literary vocation with its realistic vision of Peruvian society, especially that of Lima. More specifically,

With them, he learned to cultivate urban realism, of clear social and testimonial intent, at times inspired by the North American narrative school, Italian literary and cinematic neorealism and the ideas of «commitment» developed by Sartre. These influences are visible in Vargas Llosa's youthful stories and even in his first novels.

Later, the break with the aesthetic criteria of that generation occurs above all on the technical level and in Vargas Llosa's resistance to defending in his works theses or ideological proposals of a particular stripe. Thus, the basic novelty he introduces with his works is

the break with the naturalist model of representation and with the somewhat simplistic intellectual scheme on which that group's documentary approach rested. The very evolution of the author's novels would demonstrate his rapid aesthetic independence, stimulated by his European experience and the discovery of other forms and proposals.

In addition, his aesthetic style when structuring his sentences within his narrative is carried out in a manner that is

quite forceful. His sentences are short and sparsely adorned. He places ideas precisely and the language is always sober.

Critics tend to divide his narrative work into three groups:

The first would contain his early works: Los jefes, Los cachorros, La ciudad y los perros, La casa verde and Conversación en La Catedral. Although these are narratives very diverse in intention, subject and form (and, indeed, each work constitutes an intensification of technical and thematic complexity with respect to the previous one), they present an unquestionable unity as regards the complexity of the project and the narrative vision they propose.

From 1973, with the publication of Pantaleón y las visitadoras, Vargas Llosa began a phase marked by a questioning attitude both toward the great problems of modern Hispanic American society (especially those concerning Peru, at a critical moment in its history) and toward the narrative art with which he tries to represent them. Thus, and in an evident way, one notices a moderation of his totalizing ambition and a tendency to render stories that are generally less complex and within narrower margins, though without giving up technical devices essential to him, such as the contrast effect made possible by the parallel development of two or more stories. Even so, in this phase he published a work, La guerra del fin del mundo, which constitutes not only an exception to these general features (it is the most ambitious and significant work of the period), but also Vargas Llosa's first foray outside the physical or historical reality of his country.

From the late seventies, moreover, his reflection as a narrator addresses in particular the relationship between the real and its literary transposition, that is, what he has called «the truth of lies», or the realization that the word creates a world of its own that resembles external reality, but has its own rules and «truths».

Consequently, all these features manifest themselves in one way or another in two other groups of works: one comprising a series of novels with political themes, such as La guerra del fin del mundo, Historia de Mayta, Lituma en los Andes or La fiesta del Chivo; and another that begins with Pantaleón y las visitadoras, in which he deals with themes centered on the reworking of more private experiences (La tía Julia y el escribidor) or on classic models of the detective novel (¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?) or the erotic novel (Elogio de la madrastra).

Overview

His first published book was a collection of short stories titled Los jefes (headed by the story of the same name), which won the Leopoldo Alas prize (1959).

His first novel, La ciudad y los perros (1963), takes place within a community of students at the Leoncio Prado Military School (located in Callao) and is based on the author's personal experiences. This early work drew the general attention of the public as well as immediate success. Its vitality and skillful use of sophisticated literary techniques immediately impressed critics, and it thus won the Spanish Critics' Prize.

In 1966 his second novel, La casa verde, appeared, about a brothel of the same name whose presence in Piura affects the lives of the characters. The plot centers on Bonifacia, a girl of Awajún origin who is expelled from a convent and later becomes «la selvática», the best-known prostitute of «La casa verde». The novel immediately received an enthusiastic reception from critics, which confirmed Vargas Llosa as an important figure of Hispanic American narrative.

Three years later he published Conversación en La Catedral, his third novel, and in 1971 García Márquez: historia de un deicidio came out, which had been his doctoral thesis at the Complutense University of Madrid.

Mario Vargas Llosa, as an actor in his play Los cuentos de la peste, with Pedro Casablanc and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, premiered at the Teatro Español in Madrid (2015)

After the publication of the monumental Conversación en La Catedral, Vargas Llosa distanced himself from more serious themes, such as politics and social problems. Raymond L. Williams, a specialist in Hispanic American literature, describes this phase of his literary career as «the discovery of humor», whose first fruit was Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973), followed in 1977 by La tía Julia y el escribidor, based in part on his marriage to his first wife, Julia Urquidi, to whom he dedicated the novel.

In 1981 La guerra del fin del mundo appeared, his first historical novel and one of the most important he has written. This work initiated a radical shift in Vargas Llosa's style toward themes such as messianism and irrational human behavior. Set in the depths of the 19th-century sertão, it is based on actual events in the history of Brazil: the anti-republican revolt of millenarian Sebastianist masses led by the illuminated miracle worker Antônio Conselheiro in the town of Canudos.

After a period of intense political activity, Vargas Llosa returned to literature and in 1993 published his autobiographical book El pez en el agua, his novel Lituma en los Andes and his play El loco de los balcones. The historical Lituma would be followed by the erotic Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (1997). La fiesta del Chivo (2000), about the Dominican dictator Trujillo, was adapted for film under the same name by his cousin Luis Llosa. This novel was followed by El Paraíso en la otra esquina (2003), which alternates the story of the painter Paul Gauguin with that of his grandmother, Flora Tristán.

Another noteworthy work is an essay summarizing the course he taught at the University of Oxford on the novel Les Misérables by Victor Hugo: La tentación de lo imposible (2004). In May 2006, he presented his novel Travesuras de la niña mala, and on November 3, 2010, he published El sueño del celta, a work with which he returned to the genre of the historical novel and which deals with the life of Roger Casement, British consul in the Belgian Congo and in Peru, who between 1903 and 1911 devoted himself to investigating and denouncing the atrocities—savage exploitation, torture and genocide—committed by the regime of Leopold II in the Congo and by the company C. Arana and the British Peruvian Rubber Company in the remote jungle of the Peruvian Putumayo. In 2013 the novel El héroe discreto is once again set in Peru, and in it he narrates the experiences of two Peruvian businessmen.

Works

Vargas Llosa, accompanied by several Peruvian intellectuals and members of the Peruvian Academy of Language, on his visit to the Raúl Porras Barrenechea Institute of the University of San Marcos (2011). Among the figures surrounding him are: Marco Martos, Jorge Puccinelli, Camilo Fernández Cozman, Fernando de Szyszlo, Edgardo Rivera Martínez, Carlos Germán Belli, among others.

Main article: Mario Vargas Llosa bibliography

Editorship of literary collections

Vargas Llosa directed two literary collections for the publisher Círculo de Lectores. The first, Biblioteca de Plata, was published from 1987 to 1989 and includes 25 books of 20th-century narrative, with prologues by and selected by the Peruvian writer. These prologues would later make up the book La verdad de las mentiras (1990), an expanded version of which appeared with ten new essays in 2002. Maestros Modernos Europeos was the second collection, published between 2001 and 2004. It consists of 24 works of European narrative from the 19th and 20th centuries. The titles were selected by Vargas Llosa and include prologues by him and by other authors.

Biblioteca de Plata

• Death in Venice (1913), by Thomas Mann
• Dubliners (1914), by James Joyce
• Mrs. Dalloway (1925), by Virginia Woolf
• The Great Gatsby (1925), by Francis Scott Fitzgerald
• Manhattan Transfer (1925), by John Dos Passos
• Steppenwolf (1927), by Herman Hesse
• Sanctuary (1931), by William Faulkner
• Brave New World (1932), by Aldous Huxley
• Tropic of Cancer (1934), by Henry Miller
• Auto-da-Fé (1936), by Elias Canetti
• The Power and the Glory (1940), by Graham Greene
• The Stranger (1942), by Albert Camus
• The Woman of Rome (1947), by Alberto Moravia
• East of Eden (1952), by John Steinbeck
• I'm Not Stiller (1954), by Max Frisch
• Lolita (1955), by Vladimir Nabokov
• Doctor Zhivago (1957), by Boris L. Pasternak
• The Leopard (1958), by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
• The Tin Drum (1959), by Günter Grass
• House of the Sleeping Beauties (1961), by Yasunari Kawabata
• The Golden Notebook (1962), by Doris Lessing
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• The Clown (1963), by Heinrich Böll
• Herzog (1964), by Saul Bellow
• A Moveable Feast (1964), by Ernest Hemingway

Maestros Modernos Europeos

• War and Peace (1869), by Leo Tolstoy
• Demons (1871), by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Crime of Father Amaro (1875), by Eça de Queiroz
• Stories, by Anton Chekhov
• Gösta Berling's Saga (1891), by Selma Lagerlöf
• The Immoralist (1902), by André Gide
• The Confusions of Young Törless (1906), by Robert Musil
• The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka
• Swann in Love (1913), by Marcel Proust
• Zeno's Conscience (1923), by Italo Svevo
• The Magic Mountain (1924), by Thomas Mann
• Red Cavalry (1926), by Isaac Babel
• Nadja (1928), by André Breton
• The Radetzky March (1932), by Joseph Roth
• Journey to the End of the Night (1932), by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
• Man's Fate (1933), by André Malraux
• Seven Gothic Tales (1934), by Isak Dinesen
• Ferdydurke (1937), by Witold Gombrowicz
• Darkness at Noon (1940), by Arthur Koestler
• The Stranger (1942), by Albert Camus
• The Conformist (1951), by Alberto Moravia
• Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), by Marguerite Yourcenar
• The Leopard (1958), by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
• The Master and Margarita (1967), by Mikhail Bulgakov

Awards and honors

Main article: List of awards and honors received by Mario Vargas Llosa

Throughout his career he received countless awards and honors, most notably the Nobel Prize in Literature (2010) and the two highest awards granted in the field of Hispanic letters: the Rómulo Gallegos (1967), for his novel La casa verde, and the Cervantes (1994).

Other notable awards to his name are the National Novel Prize of Peru (1967, for La casa verde), the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature (1986) and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, awarded at the Frankfurt Book Fair (1997). In 1993 he won the Planeta for Lituma en los Andes and, previously, he had obtained the Biblioteca Breve (1963) for La ciudad y los perros, which marked the beginning of his successful international literary career. In 1999, he received the Menéndez Pelayo International Prize.

Mario Vargas Llosa receiving the doctoral cap from the rector of the University of La Rioja (2007).

Street dedicated to Mario Vargas Llosa on the campus of the University of La Rioja in the city of Logroño (Spain).

He was a member of the Peruvian Academy of Language from 1977 and of the Royal Spanish Academy from 1994, where he held the seat of the letter L. He holds several honoris causa doctorates from universities in the Americas, Asia and Europe; among them may be cited those granted by Yale (1994), Lima (1997), Ben Gurion of Israel (1998), Harvard (1999), his alma mater the Mayor de San Marcos (2001), Oxford (2003), Europea de Madrid (2005), the Sorbonne (2005), La Rioja and Málaga (2007), Alicante, Simón Bolívar (2008), Católica del Perú (2008), Granada (2009), Castilla-La Mancha, Murcia, Autónoma de México (2010), Cayetano Heredia (2011), Carlos III de Madrid (2014), Salamanca (2015) and Burgos (2016). He is soon to be awarded another honorary doctorate by the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay.

He was decorated by the French Government with the Legion of Honor in 1985, and in 2001 he received from his own government the Order of the Sun of Peru in the grade of Grand Cross with Diamonds, the highest distinction that country grants. In addition, for several years he remained the most influential intellectual in the El Poder en el Perú surveys.

In 2004 he received the Konex MERCOSUR Award for Letters, granted by the Konex Foundation (Argentina), as the most influential writer in the region.

In 2008 the National Library of Peru decided to convert its auditorium into a theater-auditorium and to name it the Mario Vargas Llosa Theater-Auditorium in homage to the writer, who attended the inaugural ceremony.

On October 7, 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature—granted "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat". He delivered his acceptance speech, titled Elogio de la lectura y la ficción, in the Grand Hall of the Swedish Academy on December 7. Three days later he received the award from King Carl XVI Gustaf at the Stockholm Concert Hall. During the gala banquet following the presentation of the Nobel Prizes, Vargas Llosa delivered a toast of thanks in the form of a short story.

On December 13 of the same year he was awarded the Order of Arts and Letters for his "extraordinary contribution to universal literature and his contribution to the cultural development of the country", in a ceremony held two days later at the Government Palace of Peru.

Coat of arms of Mario Vargas Llosa, I Marquis of Vargas Llosa

On February 4, 2011, the Boletín Oficial del Estado published the royal decree by which King Juan Carlos I granted him the title of Marquis of Vargas Llosa, which under Spanish nobility law is hereditary, citing as grounds "his extraordinary contribution, universally appreciated, to Literature and to the Spanish Language, which deserves to be recognized in a special way". Commenting on this event, the writer said: "One has to take it with humor, living in and being from a republican country; with gratitude, because it is a very affectionate gesture by the King of Spain; and with enormous surprise, since I never imagined that they would make me a marquis [...]. I thank Spain, I thank the King. And at the same time I say that I was born a commoner and I am going to die a commoner, despite the title".

On March 4, he received from the President of Mexico, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, the decoration of the Order of the Aztec Eagle, in the grade of Insignia, the highest recognition that country grants to a foreigner, for his work on behalf of Humanity.

On the 16th of the same month he was decorated with the Peruvian Order of Justice in the grade of Grand Cross by the president of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Republic of Peru, Javier Villa Stein, as Grand Master of the order. As a tribute for winning the Nobel Prize, as part of the celebrations for the 460th anniversary of the University of San Marcos, his alma mater honored him on March 30 with its highest decoration: the San Marcos Medal of Honor in the grade of Grand Cross, in addition to creating a chair bearing his name and inaugurating a museum room about the laureate writer and his years at that educational institution. The ceremony was held in the historic Casona of San Marcos and included the participation of distinguished San Marcos intellectuals who had also been Vargas Llosa's classmates, friends and teachers.

In 2011 the Vargas Llosa Chair was established as an initiative of the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library Foundation and 10 Spanish universities, with the aim of fostering and supporting the study of contemporary literature, strengthening interest in reading and writing, supporting new Ibero-American literary creation, disseminating the work of Vargas Llosa and promoting research studies, among other matters. In September 2013 this chair created the "Mario Vargas Llosa Biennial Novel Prize", which carries an award of 100,000 dollars (75,000 euros).

He was recognized as one of the "10 most influential intellectuals of Ibero-America" by the readers of the magazine Foreign Policy in 2012. On November 11 of the same year, Mexico's National Council for Culture and the Arts (Conaculta) awarded him the Carlos Fuentes International Prize for his contribution to the enrichment of humanity's literary heritage.

Also in 2012, the National University of Piura presented him with the Grand Admiral Grau decoration in a ceremony held in the auditorium of the Manuel Moncloa y Ferreyra campus.

In addition to the numerous recognitions he received, in April 2013 the Vargas Llosa Prize for the Ibero-American novel was officially launched in Lima.

The writer Mario Vargas Llosa was the recipient of the 2013 Convivencia Prize in Ceuta. It was in the course of a solemn ceremony during which he delivered a speech marked by the words coexistence, tolerance and solidarity.

In 2020 he was awarded the Festival Eñe Prize for his career and work.

In 2023 the Ministry of Culture of Peru declared four of his works (1957–1967) Cultural Heritage of the Nation: "Los jefes", "La ciudad y los perros", "La Casa Verde" and "Los cachorros".

On April 15, 2025, posthumously, the Government of Spain awarded him the Grand Cross of the Civil Order of Alfonso X the Wise.

Personal interests

Mario Vargas Llosa wearing a cap of Universitario de Deportes, the team he supported (2024).

He declared himself a music lover, with a special predilection for Gustav Mahler.

During his meeting with the international press at the Instituto Cervantes in New York, after learning that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010, Vargas Llosa stated that he considered the award a recognition of the Spanish language. Regarding his literary output, he said on that occasion:

What I do, what I say, expresses the country in which I was born, the country in which I have lived, the fundamental experiences that mark a human being, which are those of childhood and youth, in such a way that I am Peru. I can thank my country, for what I am, for being a writer.

Vargas Llosa declared himself a fan of Universitario de Deportes of Peru, and in El pez en el agua he recounts that since childhood he has been a fan of the so-called equipo crema (cream team), which he saw on the field for the first time one day in 1946 when he was 10 years old. In February 2011, the Peruvian club made him an honorary life member, in a ceremony held at the Estadio Monumental.

He spoke out against the Spanish Black Legend:

The anti-Spanish Black Legend was a propaganda operation mounted and fed over time by Protestantism—above all in its Anglican and Calvinist branches—against the Spanish Empire and the Catholic religion in order to assert its own nationalism, demonizing them to frightful extremes and even depriving them of humanity... [there are] abundant examples of it of every kind: theological treatises, history books, novels, documentaries and fiction films, comics, quips and even after-dinner jokes. Contributing to the spread and endurance of the Black Legend was the indifference with which the Spanish Empire, first, and then its intellectuals, writers and artists, instead of defending themselves, in many cases made the Black Legend their own, endorsing its excesses and fabrications as part of a fierce self-criticism that made Spain out to be an intolerant, macho, lascivious country at odds with the scientific spirit and with freedom.

Political involvement

Mario Vargas Llosa with the then President of Argentina, Mauricio Macri, in 2017.

During his time in Cahuide, Vargas Llosa distributed Marxist propaganda, collected money for detained students, and took sectarian positions in debates. He also wrote from a Marxist perspective for the organization's clandestine magazine. His first instructor in the Cahuide study circle was Héctor Béjar. The first book they studied was Georges Politzer's Elementary Lessons in Philosophy, followed by Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto and The Class Struggle in France, Friedrich Engels's Anti-Dühring and Vladimir Lenin's What Is to Be Done?. He also read José Carlos Mariátegui's Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality. After Béjar judged them mature enough for greater commitments within the organization, Vargas Llosa took the pseudonym "Comrade Alberto" following a meeting with Washington Duran Abarca and other comrades. He later drifted away from Marxism, since "it was not enough to know about Marxism, one had to believe," and he declined to become an active member of the Peruvian Communist Party, although he remained a sympathizer. His disillusionment with Marxism was settled by reading the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, from whom he learned to be an author with social responsibility. He would later become disillusioned with Sartre as well, without losing his sense of commitment to social reality. The triumph and reforms of the Cuban Revolution revived Vargas Llosa's hopes for socialism.

During the military regime of Juan Velasco Alvarado, he applauded the reforms of the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces, such as the handover of land to the peasants, worker participation in the management and ownership of companies, the recovery of natural resources and an independent national policy. On several occasions he described the regime as bold and imaginative in its economic and social reforms, but he expressed his disagreement with the government after the closure of various media outlets, saying that it suffered from symptoms of authoritarianism. From 1976 onward he distanced himself from the military government, criticizing its actions against freedom of expression.

Vargas Llosa's break with socialism came after the Padilla affair, involving a poet who was imprisoned by the Cuban regime of Fidel Castro in 1971 because of his critical positions. This incident distanced Vargas Llosa from the Cuban regime, all the more so because of the response of some writers and intellectuals to the incident, which led to his disappointment. For Vargas Llosa, however, his distancing from the left and his approach to liberalism did not make him a right-winger, since he considered that "being a liberal is not being on the right. One of the great successes of the left has been to turn the word 'liberal' into an insult."

As president of PEN International, the worldwide organization of writers, on October 22, 1976, he sent a letter to the Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla denouncing that official forces and armed commandos in civilian clothes had persecuted intellectuals, abducting them from their homes and then murdering them, torturing them or making them disappear with no news of their whereabouts. He also pointed out that dozens of writers, artists and journalists had been forced to flee the country because of death threats. This letter was circulated by various news media around the world.

In the 1980s, Vargas Llosa became politically active from his liberal positions. In 1983 the then President of Peru, Fernando Belaúnde Terry, appointed him head of the Investigative Commission on the Uchuraccay Case, whose mission was to clarify the murder of eight journalists who had traveled to the village to shed light on earlier massacres in Huaychao, in which they suspected elements of the Armed Forces might be involved. Although the results of the investigation, which attributed the murders of the journalists to indigenous peasants who allegedly mistook them for members of the Shining Path, have remained a subject of controversy ever since, those results coincide with the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, published in 2003.

In April 1984, President Fernando Belaúnde Terry proposed that he head the Council of Ministers. Vargas Llosa initially accepted and planned to form a consensus cabinet, independent and absolutely impartial; however, the writer later declined to take the post because he believed it was not the solution the country needed in those circumstances.

In response to the attempts by the Aprista government of Alan García to nationalize Peruvian banking, Vargas Llosa emerged as a political leader, heading the protest against that measure in 1987. He began his political career by founding the Libertad Movement and ran as a candidate for the presidency of Peru in 1990. For much of the electoral campaign he was the favorite. The sudden rise in popularity of Alberto Fujimori, who until 15 days before the election had polled at less than 10%, forced a runoff in which Vargas Llosa was defeated.

After the elections, he settled in Madrid. The government of Alberto Fujimori threatened to strip him of his Peruvian nationality, so, to avoid becoming stateless, at the writer's request the Spanish Government granted him Spanish citizenship by naturalization letter in 1993.

In 1990 Vargas Llosa described as the perfect dictatorship the political system of Mexico, with Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994) in the presidency and more than six decades of predominance of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in government, which forced him to leave that country quickly to avoid a political problem.

He was a constant critic of dictatorships and of those governments he considered authoritarian, challenging them in newspaper articles and public statements.

In his later years he moved toward more liberal ideological positions and maintained ties with prominent former leaders of the right in several countries, such as José María Aznar (former head of the Spanish Government) and Francisco Flores (former president of the Republic of El Salvador).

Vargas Llosa and Michelle Bachelet during a meeting in 2016.

On September 29, 2007, he took part in the launch event of the Spanish party Union, Progress and Democracy, whose Progress and Democracy Foundation named him honorary patron. He supported the presidential candidacy of the Chilean center-right businessman Sebastián Piñera and was also invited to take part, together with that country's president, Michelle Bachelet, in the inauguration of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, commemorating the victims of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Until his irrevocable resignation in September 2010, in protest "against the approval of legislative decrees whose entry into force would have allowed the release of human rights violators," Vargas Llosa chaired the High-Level Commission for the establishment of the Place of Memory of Peru, dedicated to honoring the victims of that country's internal armed conflict.

In 2009, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez challenged Vargas Llosa to a debate on his program Aló Presidente, because of Vargas Llosa's criticism of the Chavista regime. Vargas Llosa, who was in Venezuela at the time, accepted the debate, proposing that it be held directly between himself and Chávez, to which Chávez replied that the debate should be between intellectuals and not with him. In the end, Chávez withdrew his invitation, and Vargas Llosa described the situation as "contemptuous and embarrassing."

In the April 2011 general election, he voted for Alejandro Toledo (who had been president from 2001 to 2006), and when it became known that Keiko Fujimori and Ollanta Humala would decide the presidency of Peru in a runoff, he declared that he would back the latter to prevent the "return of the dictatorship that governed the country in the nineties," a clear allusion to the candidacy of Alberto Fujimori's daughter.

On May 19, in the historic Casona of the National University of San Marcos, Ollanta Humala took the oath Commitment in Defense of Democracy in the presence of several prominent Peruvian intellectuals and artists who gave him their support. During the ceremony a video sent by Vargas Llosa was shown, in which he reiterated his support in the following terms:

I believe that this oath and his revised government plan should dispel all the doubts that still persist among those who have not decided their vote. I urge you to vote for Ollanta Humala to defend democracy in Peru and spare ourselves the disgrace of a new dictatorship.

Less than a week before the vote, Vargas Llosa broke off relations with El Comercio, the newspaper that published his column Piedra de Toque, because he considered that it had become "a propaganda machine for Keiko Fujimori that, in its eagerness to prevent Ollanta Humala's victory by every means, daily violates the most elementary notions of journalistic objectivity and ethics." Once the election was over and Ollanta Humala's victory was known, Vargas Llosa stated that he had intervened in the elections because "I wanted to save democracy in Peru" and "my work has ended with the victory of Ollanta Humala."

For the 2016 elections, Vargas Llosa backed the candidacy of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in the runoff. After Kuczynski's pardon of Alberto Fujimori, Vargas Llosa declared that "PPK's betrayal will allow Fujimorism to get up to its old tricks" and that "if he releases Fujimori, he would be denying himself, denying everything he has represented for the Peruvians who brought him to power." After the outbreak of the Odebrecht case and Kuczynski's alleged involvement in it, Vargas Llosa declared that his resignation or removal should be supported if the facts were proven, and that he would not only "be a traitor to his principles and his voters, but also corrupt," also stressing the importance of "preserving this democracy that is so deteriorated, a deterioration to which Kuczynski has unfortunately contributed." When Kuczynski resigned the presidency in March 2018, Vargas Llosa called him "one of the worst presidents of Peru" and said that "we were wrong" to elect him President, stating that "he enormously disappointed those of us who brought him to power."

After the 2017 Catalan independence referendum, he took a stand against independence, together with Sociedad Civil Catalana. In January 2019 he resigned from PEN International after the position adopted by this writers' organization calling for the immediate release of the pro-independence supporters Jordi Sànchez Picanyol and Jordi Cuixart.

In 2018, Vargas Llosa had an incident with Axel Kaiser in Santiago de Chile, after Kaiser, at an event called What Is It to Be a Liberal?, suggested that there were "dictatorships that are less bad, not to say better. How many in this room would prefer to live under Maduro's dictatorship or in Cuba rather than in what the 1980s were in Chile? Probably no one. That is where the question comes in." At that, Vargas Llosa interrupted him, telling him that "I do not accept that question from you... I do not accept it, because it starts from a certain prior position: that there are good dictatorships or that there are less bad dictatorships. No, dictatorships are all bad" and that "some [dictatorships] may bring certain economic benefits to certain sectors, but the price paid for that is an intolerable and unacceptable price. I believe that entering into that dynamic is a dangerous game, which leads us to accept that some dictatorships are tolerable, acceptable, and that is not true. All dictatorships are unacceptable."

After Martín Vizcarra rose to the presidency of Peru to replace Kuczynski, Vargas Llosa highlighted that Vizcarra "has confronted corrupt Fujimorism" and said that he had surprised him. He also gave his support to the judges, prosecutors and journalists, such as Gustavo Gorriti, for investigating the Odebrecht case and obtaining the preventive detention of Keiko Fujimori. Later, he supported the dissolution of Congress carried out by Vizcarra in 2019, rejecting the labels of "dictator" applied to Vizcarra.

In November 2020, after the removal of Vizcarra, Vargas Llosa declared that Congress had "violated the Constitution" and that it was "a regrettable event, as many Peruvian jurists have pointed out, among them former prime minister Pedro Cateriano, who has described the action of Congress as a true coup d'état." He then supported the protests against the government of Manuel Merino, demanding an end to police repression and proposing Gino Costa as Merino's replacement.

In 2021, in the runoff of the 2021 general election, Vargas Llosa set aside his political differences and supported the candidacy of Keiko Fujimori, against whom he had spoken out in the two previous elections, after the candidate of Free Peru, Pedro Castillo, advanced to the runoff, arguing that the vote would be to "save the country from an enormous danger, which is falling into totalitarianism." For Vargas Llosa, a Castillo victory would be "a true catastrophe for Peru," and the runoff between Keiko Fujimori and Castillo put Peruvians "in an extremely difficult situation" in choosing between the two, but a vote for Keiko Fujimori "better guarantees the survival" of democracy, as she was the "lesser of two evils," and there were "more possibilities of saving our democracy" if she reached the presidency. Vargas Llosa also criticized Castillo for his rejection of the legalization of abortion and of marriage between people of the same sex, declaring that Castillo "is really against modernity." His call to vote for Keiko Fujimori led to Vargas Llosa being accused of being a Fujimorist, despite his anti-Fujimorism. However, the decision to support Keiko Fujimori was not due to any adherence by Vargas Llosa to Fujimorism since, as his friend Pedro Cateriano related, neither of them considered the Fujimorist candidate an exemplary candidate but rather a lesser evil "in the face of Pedro Castillo's coup-minded initiatives, such as abolishing the Ombudsman's Office and the Constitutional Court and amending the Constitution outside the procedure set by the Constitution," in addition to the fact that the leader of Free Peru, Vladimir Cerrón, was a "radical, self-confessed communist, an admirer of the Cuban Revolution, a Marxist, Leninist and Mariateguist." This led Vargas Llosa and Cateriano to make that decision.

On September 30, 2021, Vargas Llosa made a controversial comment that generated enormous controversy:

"What is important in an election is not that there be freedom in that election, but voting well. And voting well is something very important, and countries that vote badly, as has happened with some Latin American countries, pay dearly for it."

After Castillo's self-coup attempt in December 2022, Vargas Llosa expressed his condemnation of Castillo's act and asked the then newly installed president Dina Boluarte for "a broad-based cabinet in which everyone feels represented." He later declared that the failed self-coup had put an end to "the very misguided election that brought him to the Government Palace" and rejected the attempts to portray Castillo as a victim, since he considered that Castillo "sought to destroy democracy from power." Cateriano, for his part, stated: "I believe time proved him right [Vargas Llosa, regarding the decision taken by both of them]. Castillo's ephemeral coup d'état proved that he had no democratic convictions, and it is regrettable, but time, as I say, proved him right."

He then gave his support to Boluarte as constitutional president during the social upheaval, criticizing political interference in Peru and the questioning of Boluarte's legitimacy by the presidents Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico and Gustavo Petro of Colombia, in the context of the diplomatic conflict following Castillo's removal; he made these statements after receiving the government's decoration for his admission to the Académie Française. Previously, Boluarte had sent him a letter of congratulations on his admission to that academy, to which Vargas Llosa replied with another letter in which he wrote that "I have supported your accession to the Presidency, which, in strict terms, has been carried out in accordance with the laws," and that, despite the political turmoil, Boluarte had risen to the presidency constitutionally "in application of Peruvian norms," that Peruvian democrats would support her, and that the social upheaval should be overcome "in accordance with the Constitution and the Rule of law." He also received the city medal from the then Mayor of Lima, Rafael López Aliaga, although Vargas Llosa was not an admirer of López Aliaga.

In 2023, he joined the Libertad Popular party.

Electoral history

Year	Candidacy	Party or coalition	Votes	Percentage	Result
1990	President of the Republic of Peru	Democratic Front	2,171,957	32.61%	1st	Runoff
			2,713,442	37.19%	2nd	Not elected

Media involvement

Mario Vargas Llosa published his first journalistic article in issue 198 of the magazine Caretas in May 1960. On July 25, 1977, he launched his column Piedra de toque, a writer's meditation on human affairs. These columns were widely read and from 1997 were published every two weeks in Caretas, as well as in more than 20 newspapers and magazines in different parts of the world. Throughout his contributions to Piedra de Toque, the author dealt with the following topics:

1. Current debates: open topics for reflection
2. On all dictatorships: the writer recalls his aversion to every kind of dictatorship and his respect for the democratic process
3. Treatises on the effects of globalization and democracy
4. Essays on contemporary figures
5. Vargas Llosa according to Vargas Llosa: he writes about his work and his experiences
6. Cultural topics from different countries of the world
7. Topics concerning the politics of Peru:
   • During the period 1990–2000: Alberto Fujimori and Vladimiro Montesinos
   • During the period 2000–2001: Valentín Paniagua
   • During the period 2002–2006: Alejandro Toledo

In addition to being constantly interviewed by other journalists on radio and television, and taking part as a contributor or special guest in television and radio programs, Vargas Llosa had his own program on Peruvian television titled La Torre de Babel, broadcast by Panamericana Televisión in the early 1980s.

In popular culture

Film adaptations

• Día domingo, a short film adapted from the story of the same name in the book Los jefes, directed by Luis Llosa in 1970.
• Los cachorros, adapted for the screen in 1973 by Jorge Fons, winner of the Prize of the Institute of Culture at the San Sebastián International Film Festival in 1972.
• Pantaleón y las visitadoras, brought to the screen in 1975, co-directed by José María Gutiérrez and Vargas Llosa himself, who plays a supporting role.
• La ciudad y los perros, film version directed by Francisco J. Lombardi in 1985.
• Jaguar, a free adaptation of La ciudad y los perros, filmed in Russia by the Chilean director Sebastián Alarcón in 1986.
• Tune in Tomorrow, adaptation of La tía Julia y el escribidor directed by Jon Amiel in 1990.
• Pantaleón y las visitadoras, second adaptation of the novel of the same name, directed by Francisco Lombardi in 1999.
• La fiesta del Chivo, directed by Luis Llosa in 2005.

Television adaptations

• La tía Julia y el escribidor, a 1981 Colombian telenovela inspired by the work of the same name and directed by David Stivel.
• El Chivo, a 2014 telenovela inspired by La fiesta del Chivo and directed by Andrés Biermann, Rolando Ocampo and Alfonso Pineda Ulloa.
• Cuando vivas conmigo, a 2016 television series based on El héroe discreto, filmed and produced in various parts of Bogotá and Girardot, Colombia, by Caracol Televisión.
• Travesuras de la niña mala, a 2023 television series based on the work of the same name, Travesuras de la niña mala, produced by Televisa and Univision for the streaming platform Vix+.

Documentaries about Vargas Llosa

• Mario y los perros (2019), by Chema de la Peña.
• Una vida en palabras (2021), by Bertha Pantoja Arias. Ten episodes. Hosted by Álvaro Vargas Llosa.
• Un viaje personal por Le dedico mi silencio (2023). Edited by Mateo Llosa. Script by Morgana Vargas Llosa and Verónica Ramírez.

In fiction

In 2019 La pasión de Javier was released, in which the Peruvian actor Sebastián Monteghirfo played a young Vargas Llosa when he met the poet Javier Heraud (Stefano Tosso) during his stay in Paris.

Peruvianisms

According to Marco Lovón:

his linguistic and social influence are two aspects that must be considered when we study Vargas Llosa's work. If there is a Palma who is a linguist, sociologist and anthropologist, why not a Vargas Llosa who is a linguist, sociologist and anthropologist? As a man of countless awards and distinctions, Vargas Llosa offers us a space where the Peruvian lexical heritage appears in its different registers of language: colloquialisms, regionalisms and slang. La casa verde and Lituma en los Andes, works with which he won the Rómulo Gallegos and Planeta prizes, are two examples of the use of Peruvianisms.[...] Vargas Llosa's literary works offer us, preciously, examples of the use of the varieties of Spanish of Peru. From the speech of Piura, where he lived and attended fifth grade at the Colegio Salesiano of that city, he takes certain idiosyncratic words, such as churre to describe a child and piajeno to designate a donkey. In La casa verde, he records part of Piuran cuisine, such as seco de chabelo, a dish made from dried meat and green plantain, and clarito, a sweet drink obtained by separating the upper and less dense portion of chicha: "I want Piuran dishes. A good seco de chabelo, a piqueo, and clarito by the bucketful." The time he spent in Piura allowed him to introduce, with precision and naturalness, a series of Piuranisms into his literary works

"Reading Vargas Llosa is walking accompanied by some Peruvianisms such as cachimbo, calato and pararle el macho, whether one likes it or not, above all in his first great works." His writings turn out to be a sample of Peruvian lexical richness. In Los cachorros, the author uses the word trome (< metro (= maestro = m[a]e[s]tro), by metathesis) to highlight the skill of one of his characters: "Qué trome, Cuéllar, le decía Lalo, ¡aprendan, bellacos!"; and in Pantaleón y las visitadoras, he uses the term pintón (< pintar 'to matter, to be worth' + augmentative suffix -ón) to refer to the good looks of another of his characters: "Yo que creía que todos los chinos eran finitos, este es Frankenstein. Aunque a Alicia le parece pintón"," notes Lovón.

Criticism

In 2021, in response to his admission to the Académie Française, four French intellectuals issued a manifesto rejecting that admission and calling it a "mistake." These critics regard Vargas Llosa as "a far-right ultra who sullies the institution," among other reasons because of the support the writer gave to the far-right candidate for the presidency of Chile, José Antonio Kast. They also pointed to his defense of politicians with extremist positions, as well as his personal involvement in the "Pandora Papers" to evade taxes.

Genealogy

Ancestors of Mario Vargas Llosa

• 1. Mario Vargas Llosa
  • 2. Ernesto Vargas Maldonado
    • 4. Marcelino Vargas Andrade
      • 8. Isidro Vargas
      • 9. Tomasa Andrade Zavala
        • 18. Pedro Andrade
        • 19. María Zavala
    • 5. Zenobia Maldonado
  • 3. Dora Llosa Ureta
    • 6. Pedro José Llosa Bustamante
      • 12. Mariano Belisario de la Llosa y Rivero
        • 24. Mariano Darío de la Llosa y Benavides
        • 25. María del Carmen de Rivero y Tristán
      • 13. María Victoria Bustamante y Barreda
        • 26. Pedro José Bustamante y Alvizuri
        • 27. María Juana Salomé Barreda y García
    • 7. Carmen Elena Amalia Ureta Vargas
      • 14. Luis Manuel Pablo Ureta de la Jara
        • 28. José Manuel de Ureta y Peña
        • 29. María del Carmen de la Jara y Alvizuri
      • 15. Rosa Elena Vargas Gutiérrez
        • 30. José Manuel Vargas de la Flor
        • 31. Josefa Gutiérrez Pomareda

See also

• Literature of Peru
• Mario Vargas Llosa House Museum

Bibliography

• Aguirre, Carlos (2015). La ciudad y los perros. Biografía de una novela, Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. ISBN 978-612-317-086-8.
• Armas Marcelo, Juan Jesús (2008). Vargas Llosa. El vicio de escribir, Barcelona: Debolsillo. ISBN 978-84-8346-725-1.
• Campos, Jorge and José Miguel Oviedo (1981). Vargas Llosa y su «Guerra del fin del mundo», Madrid: Taurus Ediciones, ISBN 84-306-2131-8.
• Castro-Klarén, Sara (1990). Understanding Mario Vargas Llosa, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, ISBN 0-87249-668-6.
• Cateriano, Pedro (2025). Vargas Llosa, su otra gran pasión, Lima: Planeta. ISBN 978-612-332-061-4
• Cueto, Alonso (2025). Mario Vargas Llosa. Palabras en el mundo, Lima: Alfaguara.
• Garguverich, Juan (2005). Mario Vargas Llosa. Reportero a los quince. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, ISBN 9972-427-48-X.
• Koellmann, Sabine (2002). "Vargas Llosa's Fiction and the Demons of Politics". Oxford: Peter Lang, ISBN 3-906768-54-6.
• Kristal, Efraín (1998). The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, ISBN 0-8265-1301-8.
• Morote, Herbert (1998). Vargas Llosa, tal cual. Lima: Jaime Campodónico.
• Moya Espinosa, Reynaldo: Diccionario Biográfico Regional. Región Grau - Perú - Siglo XX. Editors: Genaro Maza Vera and Mario Palomino Medina. Sullana, 1993.
• Shaw, Donald (1973). «Review of Vargas Llosa, García Márquez: historia de un deicidio». '430–431, Glasgow. Retrieved April 6, 2008. (Subscription required).
• Various authors: Grandes Forjadores del Perú. Lima, Lexus Editores, 2000. ISBN 9972-625-50-8
• Vilela Galván, Sergio: El cadete Vargas Llosa. Santiago de Chile: Planeta, 2003. ISBN 956-247-310-4
• Vincent, Elizabeth (August 27, 2007), «Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa», Macleans. Retrieved March 22, 2008.
• Williams, Raymond L. (2001). Vargas Llosa: otra historia de un deicidio. México: Taurus, ISBN 968-19-0814-7.

External links

• Articles by Mario Vargas Llosa in El País
• Mario Vargas Llosa at the Instituto Cervantes
• Mario Vargas Llosa at the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library
• Website of the Cátedra Vargas Llosa