Mario Vargas Llosa, who has died at the age of 89 in his native Peru, was a towering figure in Latin American literature and culture who rarely shied away from controversy.
With more than 50 works to his name, many of which have been widely translated, Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010 when judges dubbed him a “divinely gifted story-teller”. His depictions of authoritarianism, violence and machismo, using rich language and imagery, made him a star of the Latin American Boom literary movement that shone a global spotlight on the continent.
At first sympathetic to left-wing ideas, he grew disillusioned with Latin America’s revolutionary causes, eventually running unsuccessfully for the Peruvian presidency with a centre-right party in 1990.
Vargas Llosa was born in 1936 to a middle-class family in Arequipa in southern Peru. After his parents separated while he was an infant, he moved to Cochabamba in Bolivia with his great-grandparents. He returned to Peru aged 10 and six years later he wrote his first play, The Escape of the Inca. He graduated from Lima University, studied in Spain and later moved to Paris.
His first novel, The Time of the Hero, was an indictment of corruption and abuse at a Peruvian military school. Written at a time when the country’s military wielded significant political and social power, it was published in 1962.
Its forceful, menacing imagery was condemned by several Peruvian generals. One accused Vargas Llosa of having a “degenerate mind”.
It was based on the writer’s own time as a teenager at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy, which he described in 1990 as “an extremely traumatic experience”. His two years there made him see his country “as a violent society, filled with bitterness, made up of social, cultural, and racial factions in complete opposition”. The school itself burnt 1,000 copies of the novel on its grounds, Vargas Llosa claimed.
His experimental second novel The Green House (1966) was set in the Peruvian desert and jungle, and described an alliance of pimps, missionaries and soldiers based around a brothel.
The two novels helped found the Latin American Boom literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The Boom was characterised by experimental and explicitly political works that reflected a continent in turmoil.
Its leading authors, who included Vargas Llosa’s Colombian friend and sometime rival Gabriel García Márquez – who pioneered the kaleidoscopic magical realism style of writing – became household names and their works were read around the world.
Famously the two authors did not speak to each other for decades after Vargas Llosa punched García Márquez in the face in a Mexican cinema in 1976. Reports of why Vargas Llosa punched his Colombian friend differ.
Friends of García Márquez said the dispute had revolved around García Márquez’s friendship with Vargas Llosa’s then-wife, Patricia, but Vargas Llosa told students at a Madrid university in 2017 that it had been down to their opposing views on Cuba and its communist leader, Fidel Castro.
They reconciled in 2007 and three years later, in 2010, Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize – the first South American writer to be chosen for the literature prize since Gabriel García Márquez took the honour in 1982.
Much of Vargas Llosa’s work is inseparable from the instability and violence in parts of Latin America in the second half of the 20th Century as the region experienced waves of revolutions and military rule.
His novel Conversations in the Cathedral (1969) was celebrated for exposing how the Peruvian dictatorship of 1948-56 under Manuel Odría controlled and eventually ruined the lives of ordinary people.
Like many intellectuals, Vargas Llosa supported Fidel Castro but became disillusioned with the communist leader following the “Padilla Affair” when poet Heberto Padilla was imprisoned for criticising the Cuban government in 1971.
In 1983 Vargas Llosa was appointed president of a commission investigating the gruesome killing in a village in the Peruvian Andes of eight journalists, which became known as the Uchuraccay massacre.
Peruvian officials maintained that the journalists had been killed by indigenous villagers who had mistaken the journalists for members of the Maoist Shining Path guerrilla group.
The commission’s report backed the official line, leading to fierce criticism of Vargas Llosa by those who believed that the gruesome nature of the crime and the horrific mutilations inflicted on the body were the hallmark of an infamous anti-terrorist police rather than signs of “indigenous violence”.
Moving further right on the political spectrum, in 1990 Vargas Llosa ran for the Peruvian presidency with the centre-right Frente Democrático coalition on a neo-liberal platform. He lost to Alberto Fujimori, who went on to govern Peru for the following 10 years.
Despite the criticism levelled against him over the investigation into the Uchuraccay massacre, Vargas Llosa continued to expose state terror and abuse of power through literature.
His novel The Feast of the Goat, published in 2000, focused on dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic for 31 years until his assassination in 1961. The novel won praise from the Nobel Prize Committee for its attention to “structures of power” and “images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”.
Other works were adapted for the big screen. His book Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, based on his first marriage, was adapted in 1990 into a Hollywood feature film, Tune in Tomorrow.
His later work covered figures as diverse as Irish nationalist Roger Casement (The Dream of the Celt, 2012).
He spent the latter years of his life in Peru as well as Madrid.
The author appeared in the pages of Spanish gossip magazine Hola after he left his wife of 50 years in 2015 to be with Spanish-Filipino socialite Isabel Preysler, the mother of popular Latin singer Enrique Iglesias.
He also continued to attract criticism for controversial remarks.
In 2019 he was condemned for blaming the rise in killings of journalists in Mexico – more than 100 in the past decade – on the expansion of press freedom “which allows journalists to say things that were not permitted previously”. While he also said that “narcotics trafficking plays an absolutely central part in all of this”, some commentators felt that he failed to express sympathy with the victims and their families.
And in 2018 he caused a stir when, in a column for Spanish newspaper El País, he called feminism “the most determined enemy of literature, trying to decontaminate it from machismo, multiple prejudices and immoralities”.
He died in Lima on 13 April surrounded by his family and “at peace”, his son Álvaro Vargas Llosa announced.
With his death, the last of the Latin American Boom’s great stars has gone.
