Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, Peruvian writer and academic, Nobel Prize for literature in 2010, died on Sunday at the age of 89after a life that led him to be one of the innovators of the realist novel, with a biography worthy of his best works.
Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa, Peru on March 28, 1936, when her parents, Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora llosa ureta, had just separated. He grew up in Bolivia, where his maternal grandfather was console. There he studied the Salle di Cochabamba at the school and returned to Lima from the Salesians in the city of Piura, where at just eight years old he wrote the letter to Jesus Bambinò.
The difficult relationship with his father, encountered when he was 10 years old, marked him deeply and influenced his work. It was on his insistence that he entered a military school, the Leoncio Prado di Lima, where he suffered a tough discipline that was reflected in ‘The city and dogs’ (1963), a boiled novel as a “communist”. The high school ended at the San Miguel school in Piura. In 1953, at the age of 17, he returned to Lima, where he studied literature and jurisprudence at the National University of San Marcos and graduated in philosophy and literature. Two years later, at the age of 19, he married his acquired aunt Julia Urquidi, ten years older than him, from whom he would separated in 1964.
After graduation, in 1959, Vargas Llosa He went to Spain with a scholarship For post-graduate courses at the Complutense University of Madrid, where years later he obtained his doctorate with a thesis on Gabriel Garcìa Màrquez, later published with the title ‘Garcìa Màrquez: History of a deicide‘. In 1960, he moved to Paris, where he worked as a journalist. There he finished writing his first novel, ‘The city and dogs‘(1963).
In 1965 he married the cousin Patricia Llosa, mother of her three sons, Lvaro (1966), Gonzalo (1967) and Morgana (1974) for the second time, from which he separated in 2016 after he became public his relationship with Isabel Preysler, with whom he had been until 2022. In 1966 he met Carmen Balcells, who would become his literary agent, He encouraged him to devote himself entirely to writing. Awarded the Principe delle Asturie Prize for Literature (1986, shared with Rafael Lapesa), the Cervantes Prize (1994) and the Planeta Prize (1993 for ‘Lituma in the Andes’), the writer was also the protagonist of controversy. One of the best known was The breakdown of his long friendship with Garcìa Màrquez, who punched in 1976 in a cinema. The reasons for this aggression have never been clarified, for an agreement between the two, but a hypothesis is that Garcìa Màrquez advised the wife of Vargas Llosa to separate after the alleged infidelity of the Peruvian.
In the 1980s he scored in politics and clashed with President Alan Garcìa on the bill on the nationalization of banks. He applied twice to the presidency of Peru, in 1988 and again in 1990.
He also took a political position in Spain, where he obtained Spanish citizenship in 1993. In 2014 he was the promoter of the manifesto ‘free and equal’ against Catalan secessionism. With the arrival of the year 2000, he published one of his best -selling novels, ‘The festival of the goat’ and three years after ‘Paradise in the other corner’, followed by ‘The misadventures of the bad girl’ (2006) and ‘The dream of Celta’ (2010). As an essayist he wrote ‘The temptation of the impossible’ (2004), ‘Towards freedom “(2005),’ The journey to the fiction ‘,’ The world of Juan Carlos Oneti ‘(2008) or’ Sgaboble and Utopia ‘(2009).
It was 2010 when he won the Nobel Prize for Literatureon October 7th. «I think it is a literary prize, and I hope they have assigned it more for my literary work than for my political opinions. Now, if my political opinions – in defense of democracy and freedom, and against dictatorships – have been taken into consideration, then it is fantastic, “he said after learning the news. The recognition continued and in 2011 he received the title of Marquis of Vargas Llosa, granted to him by the then King Juan Carlos I of Spain.
In the same year, on the initiative of the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library Foundation, a chair was created in its name in various universities in Spain, Panama and Peru to organize activities aimed at celebrating the writer’s eightieth birthday in 2016. Since 2013, the Mario Vargas Llosa prize for the novel has been awarded.
In love with the theaterhe shared the stage in Mèrida with his friend and theatrical Musa, the Atar actress Sànchez-Gijòn, to interpret Ulysses in ‘Odysseus and Penelope’ (2006). He later played at his side in “The Thousand and One Nights” and ‘Plague Tales’.
Vargas Llosa revealed in 2021 that the harassment suffered by a religious leader in childhood prompted him to abandon religion.
In the same year he was elected to the Academy of France and became “immortal”, an important recognition by a country that had already included it in the legendary La Plèiade collection in 2016.
In 2023, shortly after the separation from Isabel Preysler, he published his latest novel, ‘I dedicate them to the Suncio’ (I dedicate my silence to you), and resumes the relationship with his ex -wife Patricia, with whom he moved to Peru, where he reduces his public activity, even if in the last few months he visits special places of his life, such as the space previously occupied by the bar ‘La Carata’, who inspires conversations. Cathedral ‘.