Mario Vargas Llosa

Childhood and early years

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa, in southern Peru, on 28 March 1936, into a middle-class family. He was the only child of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Llosa Ureta, who separated a few months before his birth. Shortly afterwards his father revealed another relationship with a German woman, from which two younger half-brothers were born. For much of his childhood he was led to believe his father had died, since his mother and her family did not want to explain the separation.

After the divorce, his maternal family moved to Bolivia, where his grandfather had found work managing a cotton farm near Cochabamba. Vargas Llosa spent nine years there, learned to read and write and attended part of his primary schooling. In 1945, when his cousin José Luis Bustamante y Rivero became president of Peru, the grandfather was appointed prefect of Piura and the family returned. Mario attended a Salesian school in that city until, around the end of 1946 or the start of 1947, he met his father again and moved with him to Lima.

Education and the military academy

In Lima he studied at the Colegio La Salle, run by the Christian Brothers. His relationship with his father was always strained, shaped by fear, resentment and his father's incomprehension of his literary vocation. During his time at La Salle he suffered an attempted sexual abuse by a religious brother, after which, in his own words, he stopped believing in God.

At fourteen his father enrolled him in the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Callao, a regime of harsh discipline. He later said that it was there he read and wrote «as he had never done before». That experience gave rise to his first novel. Among his youthful reading were Dumas and Victor Hugo, and among his teachers was the surrealist poet César Moro, who taught him French.

In 1952 he began working as a journalist for the Lima newspaper La Crónica. Shortly afterwards he moved to Piura, where he completed his final year of secondary school and worked for the local paper La Industria. There he saw the staging of his first play, La huida del Inca. In 1953 he enrolled at the National University of San Marcos to study law and literature. In those years he briefly joined a study group linked to the Communist Party, and later a Christian Democrat party, but soon distanced himself from both.

First literary steps and Paris

In 1955 he married Julia Urquidi, who was ten years older and divorced, a union that his family rejected and which forced the couple to separate for a time. To support himself, Vargas Llosa held several jobs at once, from library assistant to cataloguing gravestones in a Lima cemetery, and worked as a journalist for Radio Panamericana. With the help of the historian Raúl Porras Barrenechea, he began to take his writing career seriously, publishing his first stories in Lima in 1956 and 1957.

In 1957 he won a short-story competition run by La Revue Française in Paris with his story El desafío, which gave him a brief stay in the French capital. In 1958 he graduated in Humanities from San Marcos and received a scholarship for postgraduate study at the Complutense University of Madrid. Before leaving for Europe he made a short journey through the Peruvian Amazon, an experience he later drew on for several novels.

In 1960 he settled in Paris with Julia, expecting to obtain another scholarship, which was finally refused. Despite the hardship, the couple decided to stay and Vargas Llosa began writing intensively. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1964. A year later he married his cousin Patricia Llosa, with whom he had three children.

The emergence of the Boom

In Paris he finished La ciudad y los perros, which reached the publisher Carlos Barral of Seix Barral through the Hispanist Claude Couffon. The novel won the Biblioteca Breve Prize in 1962 and appeared the following year. Its frankness and technical sophistication brought immediate recognition, along with hostility from some Peruvian military figures who denounced it as the work of a degenerate mind.

La casa verde (1966) established his reputation. Set in Piura and the jungle, it centres on a brothel that becomes an almost mythical presence in its characters' lives. It won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1967, giving him continental prominence. Conversación en La Catedral (1969), one of his most ambitious works, portrays the dictatorship of Manuel Odría through a dialogue between the son of a ruling-class figure and his father's chauffeur, and ranks among the central novels of the Boom alongside those of García Márquez, Cortázar and Fuentes.

In 1967 came the rupture with the Cuban Revolution he had initially supported. After the imprisonment of the poet Heberto Padilla in 1971, he broke publicly with Fidel Castro's regime, a political shift that culminated in his adoption of liberalism.

Maturity, humour and the historical novel

In 1971 he published García Márquez: historia de un deicidio, his doctoral thesis, after which he endured a long and bitter estrangement from the Colombian author. From the 1970s his work turned lighter and more comic, what Raymond L. Williams called «the discovery of humour». Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973) and La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977) exemplify this change. The second, partly autobiographical and dedicated to his first wife, offers an amusing account of his youth.

In 1981 he published La guerra del fin del mundo, his first major historical novel, based on the Canudos revolt in nineteenth-century Brazil. It was an ambitious work that opened new concerns with messianism and irrational human conduct. Later came La fiesta del Chivo (2000), about Trujillo's dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, and El sueño del celta (2010), about Roger Casement and the rubber atrocities in the Congo and the Peruvian Amazon.

Politics and public commitment

Vargas Llosa was politically active. After a period of sympathy for socialism, he adopted a liberal position in the 1980s. In 1983 he chaired the commission investigating the Uchuraccay case, set up to clarify the killing of eight journalists, and its conclusions were widely contested. In 1987 he opposed the nationalisation of the banks decreed by Alan García's government and founded the Movimiento Libertad. As the candidate of the Frente Democrático in the 1990 elections he proposed a programme of harsh liberal economic reform, but lost the run-off to Alberto Fujimori.

He afterwards withdrew from party politics, though he maintained a strong public commitment to freedom of expression and democracy, and expressed controversial views on several countries in Latin America and Europe.

Honours and final years

He received the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 1994 and the Prince of Asturias Award in 1986, among many others. In 2010 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his «cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat». In 2011 King Juan Carlos I made him Marquess of Vargas Llosa, and in 2021 he was elected to the Académie Française, the first member who had never written in French.

From 1990 he lived mainly in Madrid, though he returned often to Peru. In October 2023 he published Le dedico mi silencio, announcing his retirement from fiction, and in December he ceased writing for El País. He died in Lima on 13 April 2025, aged 89, from pneumonia.