Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa, born in 1936, Peruvian novelist, playwright, and essayist, whose writings typically deal with social change and the fight against political corruption in Peru.

Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa, Peru, and was educated in Bolivia, Peru, and Spain. His reputation was established when his novel La ciudad y los perros (1963; translated as The Time of the Hero, 1966) won a Spanish literary prize. The book is set in the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, which Vargas Llosa himself attended in the early 1950s. It describes the life led by the cadets—the perros (dogs) of the title—at the school, contrasting their experience of oppression, discipline, and bullying with the freer life in the city around them. In La casa verde (1966; The Green House, 1968), life in the remote Peruvian jungle is compared to life in the urban environment of Piura, Peru.

His other major works include Conversación en la Catedral (1969; Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975), which deals with the regime of Manuel Odría, president of Peru from 1948 to 1956; Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973; Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978), which satirizes military and religious zeal in Peru; and his semiautobiographical novel, La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1982). La guerra del fin del mundo (1982; The War of the End of the World, 1984), a historical novel about politics in Brazil in the 19th century, won wide acclaim throughout Latin America and became a bestseller in Spanish-speaking countries.

In the novel Lituma en los Andes (1993; Death in the Andes, 1996), Vargas Llosa offers a sweeping view of violence and social upheaval in contemporary Peru. Los cuadernos de Don Rigoberto (1997; The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, 1998) is an entertaining commentary on sexual identity. Vargas Llosa turned to fictionalized biography with La fiesta del chivo (2000; Feast of the Goat, 2001) about Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo, and El paraíso en la otra esquina (2002; The Way to Paradise, 2003) about French artist Paul Gauguin and his activist Peruvian French grandmother. The novel Travesuras de la niña mala (2006; The Bad Girl, 2007) is a contemporary love story with allusions to the author’s own love for Madame Bovary, the classic of French literature by Gustave Flaubert.

Vargas Llosa’s critical works include a study of the fiction of Colombian writer and Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, entitled García Márquez: Historia de un deicido (García Márquez: Story of a God-Killer, 1977), and Entre Sartre y Camus (Between Sartre and Camus, 1981), a study of the works of French writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Vargas Llosa has taught and lectured throughout the world. In 1990 he ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of Peru against Alberto Fujimori. He later produced a memoir of the campaign, El pez en el agua (1993; A Fish in the Water, 1994).