Mario Vargas Llosa died in Lima. His son Alvaro Vargas Llosa reports it on social media. Spanish naturalized Peruvian writer and playwright, Llosa was 89 years old. Considered one of the greatest contemporary novelists and essayists, he had received numerous awards including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010 and the Cervantes Prize in 1994. Among his most famous novels, the city and dogs (1963), La Casa Verde (1966), conversation in the cathedral (1969).
Vargas Llosa had returned to live in in the Peruvian capital in 2022, after a long period of residence in Europe starting from 1990, the year in which he committed himself without success in the country’s presidential elections as a candidate for a center-right coalition.
“With deep pain, we know that our father, Mario Vargas Llosa, died today in Lima, surrounded by his family and in peace,” wrote his son.
Among the most significant rumors of South American literature, he reached fame with realistic novels ‘The city and dogs’, a crimally realistic depiction (partly autobiographical) of life in the military college of Lima, and ‘the green house’, set in a cottage of the Peruvian province. In 2010 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature “for his cartography of the structures of power and for the acute images of the resistance, revolt and defeat of the individual”.
Less raw narrative registers and underlying question about writing and relationships between reality and fiction characterize subsequent novels, in which eroticism is often one of the dominant reasons. Copious the production of theatrical texts.
“His disappearance will sadden his relatives, friends and readers all over the world, but we hope that they find comfort, like us, in the fact that he has had a long, varied and fruitful life and that he leaves a work that will survive him”, reads the message released by the family, who has specified that in the next few hours and in the next few days he will proceed “according to the instructions” of the writer, including the ban on “public ceremony”.
«Our mother, our children and we trust that we have the space and privacy necessary to greet him with our family and in the company of his closest friends. His remains, as per his desire, will be cremated », he says.
In 2022 Vargas Llosa had returned to live in his apartment in Lima, located in the Bohèmien district of Barranco, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, where he had resumed the relationship with his wife, Patricia Llosa.
Vargas Llosa was the first Spanish language author to join the Academie Francaise, in February 2023. In his speech, he said that “thanks to France”, where he began to write some of his most important novels, he discovered “another Latin America”.
Born in Arequipa, in Peru, in 1936, he has always shown a great work ability, discipline and a desire to live that led him to try his hand at fields other than writing, such as the candidacy for the presidency of Peru in 1990 and the performance at the theater as an actor.
In recent months, his neighbors of Barranco had become accustomed to the image of Vargas Llosa, who wandered for the corners of Lima resting on his stick.