Mario Vargas Llosa

Born Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa on March 28, 1936, in Arequipa, Peru, he was the son of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Llosa Ureta, who had separated from him months before the birth. Raised by his mother's family, he moved with them to Cochabamba, Bolivia, when his grandfather was named Peru's honorary consul there, and grew up believing his father was dead; the family later returned to Piura, and at ten he met his father for the first time. At fourteen his father sent him to the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Callao, which he left at sixteen to work as a journalist. In 1953 he enrolled at the National University of San Marcos to study law and literature, and in 1955 he married Julia Urquidi, a Bolivian ten years his senior whose sister was married to his uncle. A scholarship took him to Madrid in 1958 and on to Paris, where he stayed and wrote. The Time of the Hero (1963), his novel of cadet life at Leoncio Prado, won the Biblioteca Breve prize and was denounced by the academy's leadership; The Green House (1965) and Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) followed and made him a central figure of the Latin American Boom. He married his cousin Patricia Llosa in 1965, and turned to comedy in Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), the second drawn from his first marriage. The War of the End of the World (1981) and The Feast of the Goat (2000) carried his fiction to Brazil and the Dominican Republic. In 1990 he ran for president of Peru, won the first round and lost the runoff to Alberto Fujimori; he took Spanish citizenship in 1993, won the Cervantes Prize in 1994, and in 2010 received the Nobel Prize for 'his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat.' Elected to the Académie française in 2021, he published his last novel, Le dedico mi silencio, in 2023, and died in Lima on April 13, 2025, at eighty-nine.

In the autumn of 1958, as a student in Madrid, Vargas Llosa began his first novel in a tavern called El Jute and finished it in a Paris attic in 1961. Seix Barral's readers reported against it, but Carlos Barral found the manuscript in a desk drawer and had it entered for the Biblioteca Breve prize. It won unanimously.