Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa wrote the novels that the pages of two dictators cite, ran for president of Peru and lost to an unknown, and took the Nobel Prize in 2010 as the last of the Latin American Boom. He was born in Arequipa in 1936 to parents who had separated before his birth, was told his father was dead, and met him at ten, when the man took him back and later sent him to the Leoncio Prado military academy in Lima to make him less of a poet. The academy became his first novel, The Time of the Hero, in 1963; the army burned copies in the courtyard. He had married his uncle's sister-in-law at nineteen, gone to Madrid and Paris, and written for a living in three languages, and the books came in a rush: The Green House in 1966, Conversation in the Cathedral in 1969, which asks on its first page when Peru was screwed, and The War of the End of the World in 1981, about Canudos. He was a friend of García Márquez until he knocked him down in a Mexico City cinema in 1976, and neither ever said why. He left the left after Cuba jailed the poet Padilla in 1971 and became the Spanish-speaking world's most eloquent liberal. In 1987 he led the campaign against Alan García's nationalisation of the banks, and in 1990 he ran for president at the head of a coalition promising to end hyperinflation by shock; he led the first round and lost the run-off to Alberto Fujimori, an agronomist nobody had heard of, whom Peru's poor preferred to a novelist who wanted to cut subsidies. He took Spanish citizenship in 1993 and wrote it all up in A Fish in the Water. The Feast of the Goat in 2000, about the last day of Trujillo and the men who killed him, is the book the Dominican page means. He was elected to the Académie française in 2021 without having written a book in French, and died in Lima in April 2025 at eighty-nine.
- Lived: 1936 CE – 2025 CE
- Nationality: Peruvian
- Roles: novelist, politician
