Mario Vargas Llosa, farewell to a literary giant

Literature with a capital L has said goodbye to one of its greats. Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, has died at the age of 89 in Lima, as announced by his own children, Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana, in an official statement. 

One of the world's greatest exponents of literature leaves us after an extremely intense and highly successful life dedicated to the literary and journalistic world.

The Spanish-Peruvian writer goes down in history as an exceptional novelist, essayist, commentator, columnist, intellectual and academic of the Spanish language. He is the author of great works such as ‘Conversation in the Cathedral’, ‘The City and the Dogs’ and ‘The Feast of the Goat’. 

‘His passing will sadden his relatives, his friends and his readers, but we hope they will find comfort, as we do, in the fact that he enjoyed a long, varied and fruitful life, and leaves behind him a body of work that will outlive him. We will proceed in the coming hours and days according to his instructions,’ his children said in the official statement. ‘There will be no public ceremony. Our mother, our children and we ourselves trust that we will have the space and privacy to bid him farewell as a family and in the company of close friends. His remains, as was his wish, will be cremated,’ they added. 

A farewell that apparently is already out of the media spotlight, unlike what happened in life, because Mario Vargas Llosa was a long-time protagonist in the media, both for his literary and journalistic production and success and for his personal life, having high-profile romantic relationships such as the one he had with Isabel Preysler, which came after a long marriage. 

In October 2023 he published his last novel, ‘I dedicate my silence to you’, with which he bid farewell to the world of fiction. Two months later he also bid farewell to journalistic columnism, that is to say, to his ‘Piedra de toque’, the column that he had been publishing fortnightly in the newspaper El País since 1990. 

In 2010, at the age of 74, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for his cartography of power structures and his trenchant images of resistance, rebellion, and the defeat of the individual,’ as the Swedish Academy officially stated when announcing the award. 

A Mario Vargas Llosa who was linked to neoliberal political thought in defence of liberalism, political, economic and cultural, close to rather conservative theses, in opposition to the more leftist postulates that he rejected, especially in the way in which it is applied in Latin America.

Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa in March 1936 and his literary output has been prolific and quite successful. So successful and prominent that it is worth remembering that he is the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in the Spanish language. 

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was a writer, politician and even a journalist. He spent his childhood between Bolivia and Peru and, after finishing his primary education, he worked for the newspapers La Crónica and La Industria. In 1952 he wrote a play entitled ‘The Flight of the Inca’, which premiered in a theatre in Lima. 

He studied Literature and Law at the National University of San Marcos and began to contribute professionally to newspapers and magazines, becoming editor of ‘Cuadernos de Composición’ and the magazine Literatura. 

In 1958 he was awarded a ‘Javier Prado’ scholarship to study at the Complutense University of Madrid, where he obtained a PhD in Philosophy and Letters. A year later he moved to Paris, where he worked in different media until he managed to get a job at Agence France Presse and, later, at Radio Télévision Française, where he met numerous Spanish-American writers.

In 1965 he joined the Cuban magazine Casa de las Américas as a member of its Editorial Board and remained there until 1971. During those years he served several times as a juror for the Casa de las Américas awards.

Later he travelled to New York, invited to the World Congress of the PEN Club, and took up residence in London, where he worked as a professor of Spanish-American Literature at Queen Mary College. 

During this period he also worked as a translator for UNESCO in Greece, together with Julio Cortázar; until 1974, his life and that of his family was spent in Europe, residing in Paris, London and Barcelona.

In 1975 he began a series of film projects, and in March of that year he was elected a Full Member of the Royal Peruvian Academy of Language. In 1976 he was elected president of International PEN, a post he held until 1979. 

In Peru he presented the television programme ‘La Torre de Babel’ and in 1983 he chaired the Investigative Commission of the Uchuraccay case, dedicated to solving the murder of eight journalists. At the end of the eighties he entered the world of politics in Peru and in 1990 he returned to London, where he resumed his literary activity. 

In March 1993 he obtained Spanish nationality, without renouncing his Peruvian one. He contributed to the newspaper El País and to the cultural magazine Letras Libres. 

In 1994 he was appointed a member of the Royal Spanish Academy and that same year he won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize; he was later awarded an honorary degree by numerous universities. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages, which is a testament to its quality

In 2013 he was awarded the ‘Columnists of El Mundo’ prize in recognition of his journalistic work, which also demonstrates his impact on the world of journalism and the media. 

His crowning moment came with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. Mario Vargas Llosa became the eleventh Spanish-language author and the sixth Latin American to win this illustrious award, which was given to the Peruvian writer for his body of work. That same year he launched his novel ‘The Dream of the Celt’, although his rise to fame and recognition came with the work, ‘The Time of the Hero’, in 1963. 

Among the most outstanding of his literary production are also ‘Conversation in the Cathedral’, 1969, ‘Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter’, 1977, ‘The War of the End of the World’, 1981, ‘The Feast of the Goat’, 2000, and ‘The Dream of the Celt’ itself, 2010.