Alfredo Bryce Echenique

Born Alfredo Marcelo Bryce Echenique on February 19, 1939, in Lima, into a family of bankers whose ancestors included José Rufino Echenique, president of Peru in the 1850s, he grew up inside the oligarchy he would spend his career taking apart with affection and laughter. He was schooled at the Inmaculado Corazón and, after a punishment at the Santa María Marianistas put him in hospital at thirteen, at the British boarding school San Pablo; both schools would return in his fiction. To please his father he studied law at San Marcos, reading literature alongside it, and opened a law practice that found almost no clients. In 1964 he left for Paris on a scholarship to write a thesis on Henry de Montherlant, studied at the Sorbonne, spent time in Perugia, Mykonos and Germany, and from 1968 taught Latin American literature at Nanterre, the Sorbonne and Vincennes. His first book, the twelve stories of Huerto cerrado (1968), won a mention from Cuba's Casa de las Américas, and his first novel, A World for Julius (1970), followed a small boy in a rich Lima household whose warmest ties are with the servants; it won Peru's National Prize for Literature in 1972. Starting to publish after the Boom writers had made their names, he became a central voice of what came after, writing long, digressive, comic novels of love and exile such as La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña (1981) and No me esperen en abril (1995). He taught at Montpellier from 1980, settled in Spain in 1984, won Spain's National Prize for Narrative for Reo de nocturnidad in 1998 and the Premio Planeta for El huerto de mi amada in 2002, and announced his permanent return to Peru in 1999. In 2009 Peru's intellectual property authority fined him for plagiarising sixteen newspaper articles, a ruling he never accepted, and his 2012 FIL Prize in Romance Languages was contested because of it. He closed his three volumes of antimemoirs with Permiso para retirarme and died in Lima on March 10, 2026, aged 87.

In 1972 Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Ramón Ribeyro entered their friend's first novel for a state culture prize, and it won. At the ceremony the education minister announced that General Velasco and Bryce Echenique between them had finished off the Peruvian oligarchy. A conservative relative of Bryce's in the audience fainted and was carried out on a stretcher.