Discover how his final novel, political battles, and turbulent personal life shaped the legacy of a literary giant.
Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa passed away this Sunday in Lima, according to a statement released by his children Álvaro, Gonzalo, and Morgana. Born in Arequipa on March 28, 1936, the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate had just turned 89. Author of landmark works such as Conversation in the Cathedral, The Time of the Hero, and The Feast of the Goat, he was one of the most important contemporary writers in any language. Novelist, essayist, polemicist, columnist, and academic, Vargas Llosa will go down in history as an extraordinary storyteller and an old-school intellectual—meaning, from before the age of social media.
“His passing will sadden his relatives, friends, and readers, but we hope they find comfort, as we do, in the fact that he enjoyed a long, full, and fruitful life, and leaves behind a body of work that will outlive him,” the statement from his children reads. “There will be no public ceremony. Our mother, our children, and we trust we will have the space and privacy to say goodbye in the company of close friends. His remains, as was his wish, will be cremated,” they added.
In October 2023, he published his final novel, I Dedicate My Silence to You, which concluded with a brief afterword announcing his farewell to fiction. Two months later, he also said goodbye to journalism, stepping away from his long-running column Piedra de Toque, published biweekly in El País since 1990. These articles showcased his relentless intellectual curiosity and eagerness to engage in all political and social debates of the day. In them, as in some of his essays, Vargas Llosa appeared as morally progressive but economically neoliberal—a stance that baffled (and even irritated) many admirers of his novels.
His conservative political stance was long cited as the reason for the delay in receiving the Nobel Prize, for which he seemed destined. In 2010, just as he had disappeared from betting lists, the Swedish Academy woke him up in New York—where he was a visiting professor at Princeton—to tell him he had finally won the most coveted medal in world literature. The reason? “For his cartography of power structures and his sharp images of individual resistance, rebellion, and defeat.” He was 74 and had just sent off The Dream of the Celt, a novel about colonialism and the brutal exploitation of rubber.
Since debuting at age 23 with a short story collection, The Leaders (1959), he never stopped writing and publishing. Still, by the time of the Nobel, his last major work of fiction dated back a decade: The Feast of the Goat (2000). That novel, based on real events surrounding Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, was his late contribution to Latin American literature’s unofficial mission to depict the region’s dictatorships—a tradition that included Gabriel García Márquez (The Autumn of the Patriarch), Miguel Ángel Asturias (Mr. President), and Augusto Roa Bastos (I, the Supreme).
Vargas Llosa played a key role in the global explosion—the famous “Boom”—of Latin American literature. In 1963, as a young man, he won the Biblioteca Breve Prize with The Time of the Hero, inspired by his own youth at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, a grim place where his father had enrolled him to remove him from the gentle maternal family orbit.
The return of his authoritarian father—whom he had believed dead for years—marked the traumatic end of a peaceful childhood spent in Cochabamba (Bolivia) and Piura, in northern Peru. That pivotal moment became the opening of his 1993 memoir A Fish in the Water, published three years after Alberto Fujimori defeated him in Peru’s presidential election. That political frustration forms the even-numbered chapters of a dual narrative; the odd-numbered ones recount his literary and emotional education, from a 1957 trip to Paris to his rescue of a stray dog named Batuque, a moment that opened Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) with the legendary first line: “At what precise moment had Peru f***ed itself up?”
That novel marked his first as a professional writer, thanks to a key figure in his career: literary agent Carmen Balcells. In 1966, he and his family were barely getting by in London, supported by his teaching job at Queen Mary College. Balcells offered him an advance in exchange for dedicating himself full-time to writing—on the condition that he move to Barcelona. He did so from 1970 to 1974, sharing the city with future Nobel winner Gabriel García Márquez, a close friend until an unresolved dispute led to Vargas Llosa giving him a black eye.
Lima, Madrid, Paris, London, and Barcelona formed the map of a man often described as a universal writer. He drew from every source and entered every debate. His literary master was Gustave Flaubert—from whom he learned that effort can substitute for talent—and his first ideological guide was Jean-Paul Sartre. For years he was known as “the brave little Sartre,” believing deeply in the writer’s moral duty, a concept Sartre championed. His final literary project, a study of his own work, was cut short by death.
In 1971, after the Padilla Affair, he broke with the Cuban Revolution and communism. From then on, his influences came from the other side: political liberalism shaped by Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin, and Raymond Aron, and economic neoliberalism aligned with Margaret Thatcher. The fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s marked the triumph of these ideas.
He often joked, with his characteristic dry humor, that his grandmother once defined a liberal as “someone who doesn’t go to church and gets divorced.” In one of his last TV interviews, recorded for his friend Mercedes Milá’s program, Vargas Llosa said that to him, family represented order, while he had always pursued “adventure.” His love life defied bourgeois conventions: first with his aunt Julia, 10 years older; then with his cousin Patricia, the mother of his three children; and later with socialite Isabel Preysler, whom he dated from 2015 to their scandalous breakup in 2022.
Holder of every major literary award—from the Cervantes to the Nobel, including the Princesa de Asturias and Rómulo Gallegos—Vargas Llosa was also a member of the Royal Spanish Academy (seat L), where he was inducted in 1996 with a speech on Azorín, responded to by Camilo José Cela. In November 2021, he became an “immortal” of the Académie Française despite never writing a line in French. “I secretly aspired to be a French writer,” he confessed at his 2023 induction ceremony, attended by King Juan Carlos of Spain.
Used to collecting accolades, he often said his main goal was not to become a statue. In 2019, when many thought his best work was behind him, he published the powerful Harsh Times, about the 1954 CIA-backed coup in Guatemala. The novel closed with a passage acknowledging that this U.S. intervention drove revolutionary Cuba to seek protection from the Soviet Union. “History could have been different,” he wrote, if the U.S. had embraced Guatemala’s democratic modernization instead. That admission was one of the last great insights of a writer who loved to argue—and who never debated cynically.
For Vargas Llosa, literature and politics were always two sides of the same coin: individual freedom. Even at the cost of social justice. That’s why, in his Nobel acceptance speech, he declared: “The lies of literature become truths through us, the readers, transformed and infected by desire, perpetually at odds with mediocre reality because of fiction.” Reading, he said, inoculates the human spirit with rebellion. “That’s why we must continue dreaming, reading, and writing—the best way we have found to ease our mortality, defy the decay of time, and turn the impossible into the possible.”
