Remembering author Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel laureate and stalwart of Latin American Boom

The Peruvian Nobel laureate passed away on Sunday (April 13) in Lima. He was 89.

The making of a writer

Vargas Llosa’s formative years were marked by conflict and rupture. Born in 1936, he was raised initially by his mother’s family in Bolivia and in Arequipa in northern Peru following his parents’ estrangement. He did not meet his father until the age of 10 — a man whose authoritarianism would later inform much of the writer’s recurring themes. His education at a military academy in Lima provided the setting for his breakthrough novel The Time of the Hero (1963). A critique of institutional decay, the book scandalised Peru’s military establishment and signalled the arrival of a formidable new voice.

Vargas Llosa’s early novels — The Green House (1966) and Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) — confirmed his burgeoning reputation. Drawing inspiration from William Faulkner, Gustave Flaubert, and the rich oral traditions of Latin America, he wove intricate, often non-linear narratives that dissected the complexities of power, corruption, and identity.

Unlike García Márquez’s magical realism or Cortázar’s surreal experimentation, Vargas Llosa’s fiction was anchored in realism that was almost architectural in design. From the comic irreverence of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977) to the meta-narratives of Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973), his range was formidable. His later novels, such as The Feast of the Goat (2000), a portrayal of Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, and The Dream of the Celt (2010), a biographical novel about the Irish revolutionary Roger Casement, reflected his preoccupation with tyranny, moral ambiguity, and the capacity of storytelling to illuminate and complicate history. Each story, no matter its tenor, was underpinned by a moral inquiry — what does it mean to be free, and at what cost?

From revolution to liberalism

Like many Latin American intellectuals of his time, he was initially sympathetic to the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro’s promise of radical change. However, by the late 1960s, disillusionment with the authoritarian tendencies of leftist regimes — particularly the repression of dissent in Cuba — led Vargas Llosa to reject Marxism.

By the 1980s, he had embraced liberal democracy and free-market economics, heavily influenced by thinkers like Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper. This ideological shift alienated him from many of his peers. But it also marked his emergence as a prominent liberal intellectual in the classical sense — committed to open societies, the rule of law, and a limited role for the state in the economic lives of its citizens. His 1990 run for the Peruvian presidency as the head of a centre-right coalition was emblematic of this transformation. Advocating for free markets, privatisation, and institutional reform, Vargas Llosa presented himself as an alternative to the populist Alberto Fujimori. He lost the election, but Fujimori’s subsequent authoritarianism vindicated many of Vargas Llosa’s warnings, even as it underscored the limits of the writer’s own political effectiveness.

Yet, Vargas Llosa never retreated from the public sphere. He remained a prolific polemicist, using his writing to denounce populism, nationalism, and authoritarianism across the globe.

Nobel Prize and literature as resistance

In 2010, Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”. The Nobel affirmed what had long been evident: that Vargas Llosa’s fiction was not about escapism, it was about interrogating systems of domination — political, sexual, religious — and illuminating the costs of resistance.

In his Nobel acceptance speech, he said, “Without fictions we would be less aware of the importance of freedom for life to be livable, the hell it turns into when it is trampled underfoot by a tyrant, an ideology, or a religion. Let those who doubt that literature not only submerges us in the dream of beauty and happiness but alerts us to every kind of oppression, ask themselves why all regimes determined to control the behaviour of citizens from cradle to grave fear it so much they establish systems of censorship to repress it and keep so wary an eye on independent writers. They do this because they know the risk of allowing the imagination to wander free in books, know how seditious fictions become when the reader compares the freedom that makes them possible and is exercised in them with the obscurantism and fear lying in wait in the real world.”

Enduring legacy despite contradictions

A liberal who revered order, a novelist devoted to realism, a critic of radicalism who once flirted with revolution, Vargas Llosa was, in many ways, an anachronism. His contradictions, however, did not diminish his influence; his commitment to individual freedom and intellectual pluralism made him both a revered and polarising figure, particularly within Latin America.

His work, alternatingly provocative, eloquent, and humane, remains a testament to literature’s unique ability to showcase the world not as it should be, but as it is — troubling, beautiful and relentlessly complex.