Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa dies

Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa passed away on Sunday (April 14), aged 89.

The Nobel laureate died in Peru’s capital Lima surrounded by his family and “at peace,” his son Alvaro Vargas Llosa, a well-known political commentator, said on X.

Rumors of the writer’s deteriorating health had spread in recent months, during which he had been living out of the public eye.

Vargas Llosa was a leading figure in Latin America's1960s literary scene. He continued to write novels and essays for decades, with his works being translated into many languages.

Vargas Llosa was granted honorary doctorates, prizes and awards worldwide throughout his lifetime. The most prestigious award was undoubtedly the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, which the Swedish Academy awarded him for "his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt and defeat."

"We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life," said Vargas Llosa in his acceptance speech at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on December 7, 2010.

"Good literature erects bridges between different peoples, and by having us enjoy, suffer, or feel surprise, unites us beneath the languages, beliefs, habits, customs, and prejudices that separate us," he added.  

In 2016, he became the first living Spanish-speaking writer to be included in France's Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, a venerable collection of universal classics translated into French, and he was elected a member of the prestigious Academie Francaise in 2021.

Born Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa to a middle-class family on March 28, 1936 in Arequipa, Peru, he spent the early years of his childhood in Bolivia before returning to his native country.

As a teenager, he attended a military academy in Lima, and soon started working as a local journalist. A student of law and literature, Vargas Llosa started to write short stories first published in the late 1950s. He moved to Paris in 1959, and lived there for several years._Agencies