Mario Vargas Llosa, prominent Peruvian writer, essayist, politician and public intellectual, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, passed away on Sunday 13 April in Lima, Peru, at the age of 89. He was Simón Bolívar Professor at the Centre of Latin American Studies in the University of Cambridge 1977-78, and Fellow of Churchill College.
In 1977 he published his novel La tía Julia y el escribidor, a semi-autobiographical work that marked a transition in his writing from his early experimental and political style to a more humorous and personal narrative. This coincided with his tenure of the Simón Bolívar Chair.
During his time at Cambridge, Vargas Llosa also gave lectures on several writers, including José María Arguedas, about whom he published a book years later, in 1996: La Utopía arcaica: José María Arguedas y las ficciones del indigenismo.
He visited Cambridge subsequently on a number of occasions, most notably in 2013, when he was conferred an honorary doctorate by the University.
At the start of more than five decades of sustained and varied output, he was one of the most prominent figures of the literary phenomenon known as the “Latin American boom”, and he now leaves a formidable legacy of novels, essays and plays. His literary oeuvre includes novels set both in his native Peru and in other countries of the region and beyond, beginning with The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros 1963), The Green House (1966), Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), and continuing later with The War at the End of the World (1981) set in Brazil, The Feast of the Goat (2000) set in the Dominican Republic, The Dream of the Celt (2010), inspired by the life of Sir Roger Casement, and Harsh Times (2019) built around the CIA-backed 1954 coup in Guatemala.
We offer our deepest condolences to his family.
Photo: Mario Vargas Llosa, writer. Quim Llenas Getty Images