Mario Vargas Llosa

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Lore & Background

Mario Vargas Llosa was born to a middle-class family in Arequipa, Peru, on 28 March 1936. His parents separated a few months before his birth, and he lived with his maternal family in Arequipa until a year after their divorce, when his maternal grandfather was named honorary consul for Peru in Bolivia. The family moved to Cochabamba, Bolivia, where Vargas Llosa spent his early childhood. As a child, he was led to believe his father had died—his mother and her family did not want to explain the separation. During the government of President José Bustamante y Rivero, his maternal grandfather obtained a diplomatic post in Piura, and the family returned to Peru. In 1946, at age ten, he moved to Lima and met his father for the first time. His parents re-established their relationship, and they lived in Magdalena del Mar during his teenage years. When Vargas Llosa was fourteen, his father sent him to the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Callao. At 16, before graduation, he began working as a journalist for local newspapers. He withdrew from the military academy and finished his studies in Piura, where he worked for the local newspaper La Industria and witnessed the theatrical performance of his first dramatic work, La huida del Inca. In 1953, during the government of Manuel A. Odría, he enrolled in Lima's National University of San Marcos to study law and literature. While at the university, he was a member of a communist group. He married Julia Urquidi, his maternal uncle's sister-in-law, in 1955 at age 19; she was 10 years older. They divorced in 1964. A year later, he married his first cousin, Patricia Llosa, with whom he had three children: Álvaro (born 1966), Gonzalo (born 1967), and Morgana (born 1974).

Reader's Guide

Vargas Llosa rose to international fame in the 1960s with novels such as The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros, 1963/1966), The Green House (La casa verde, 1965/1968), and Conversation in The Cathedral (Conversación en La Catedral, 1969/1975). His first novel, The Time of the Hero, set among cadets in a Lima military school, won the Premio de la Crítica Española but sparked controversy in Peru, with several generals attacking it. The Green House won the first edition of the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize in 1967. In 1967, he published Los cachorros, a short novel centered on a boy marked by a brutal school accident. He lectured on Spanish American Literature at King's College London from 1969 to 1970. In 1971, he published García Márquez: Story of a Deicide, his doctoral thesis for the Complutense University of Madrid. He won the 1967 Rómulo Gallegos Prize, the 1986 Prince of Asturias Award, the 1994 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1995 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 2012 Carlos Fuentes Prize, and the 2018 Pablo Neruda Order of Artistic and Cultural Merit. Politically active, he initially supported the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro but became disenchanted after the imprisonment of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971, later identifying as a classical liberal. He ran for president of Peru with the centre-right Democratic Front coalition in the 1990 election, advocating for liberal reforms, but lost to Alberto Fujimori in a landslide. He was made Marquess of Vargas Llosa by King Juan Carlos I of Spain in 2011 and elected to the Académie Française in 2021.

Did You Know?

• Vargas Llosa was the only child of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Llosa Ureta, who separated a few months before his birth.
• As a child, he was led to believe his father had died; he met his father for the first time at age ten in 1946.
• He married Julia Urquidi in 1955 at age 19; she was 10 years older and his maternal uncle's sister-in-law.
• His novel The Green House won the first edition of the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize in 1967.
• He was made Marquess of Vargas Llosa by King Juan Carlos I of Spain in 2011 and elected to the Académie Française in 2021.