Mario Vargas Llosa, the esteemed Peruvian author and Nobel laureate in Literature, passed away at the age of 89 in Lima, Peru. His death was confirmed by his children on social media . Vargas Llosa's literary career spanned several decades, during which he produced a vast array of works that delved into themes such as male violence, societal disruption, and authoritarian politics. His debut novel, "The Time of the Hero" (1962), ignited controversy within the Peruvian military and established him as a formidable voice in Latin American literature .
The author’s lawyer and close friend, Enrique Ghersi, confirmed the death to The Associated Press and recalled the writer’s last birthday on March 28 at the home of his daughter, Morgana. “He spent it happy; his close friends surrounded him, he ate his cake, we joked that day that there were still 89 more years to go, he had a long, fruitful, and free life,” Ghersi said.
Vargas Llosa charted power and corruption in a series of novels including The Time of the Hero, Conversation in the Cathedral and The Feast of the Goat. Living a life that was as colourful as his fiction, Vargas Llosa also launched a failed bid for the Peruvian presidency, nursed a long-running feud with Gabriel García Márquez and triumphed as a Nobel laureate in 2010.
Born in Arequipa in 1936, Vargas started working as a crime reporter when he was just 15. Four years later, he eloped with his 32-year-old aunt by marriage, Julia Urquidi, a departure his father called a “virile act”. A trip to Paris in 1958 was the beginning of 16 years abroad, living in Madrid, Barcelona and London as well as the French capital. But while working as a journalist, broadcaster and teacher, Vargas Llosa began to return to his homeland in fiction.
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".
Vargas Llosa played a pivotal role in the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s alongside contemporaries such as Gabriel García Márquez. His notable works include "Conversation in the Cathedral", "The War of the End of the World", and "The Feast of the Goat", each reflecting profound insights into political and social realities across Latin America . Despite his brief foray into politics with an unsuccessful presidential run in 1990, he later emphasized that literature transcends political boundaries .
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