A celebrated author and Nobel literature laureate with Syracuse University ties is dead at age 89.
Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa died in Lima, Peru, on Sunday, while surrounded by his family, according to the Associated Press. A cause of death was not provided.
“His departure will sadden his relatives, his friends and his readers around the world, but we hope that they will find comfort, as we do, in the fact that he enjoyed a long, adventurous and fruitful life, and leaves behind him a body of work that will outlive him,” his children wrote in a statement.
Vargas Llosa was a prolific author, playwright and essayist whose works included the novels “The Time of the Hero” (La Ciudad y los Perros) and “Feast of the Goat,” plus collections of Latin American letters and stories like “The Cubs and Other Stories” (Los Jefes). He received a Nobel Prize in 2010 “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”
Vargas Llosa served at Syracuse University as the Jeanette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor in the spring of 1988. His time at SU led to “A Writer’s Reality,” written by Vargas Llosa and published in 1991 with an introduction by Myron Lichtblau.
According to Syracuse University, the book was the idea of Lichtblau, a Latin American scholar and former professor and chair of SU’s Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics. He transcribed Vargas Llosa’s lectures from tape recordings, and it turned into “a kind of accidental, literary autobiography.”
“Based on a series of lectures delivered at Syracuse University, these eight essays delve into what Vargas Llosa sees as a writer’s raison d’etre: the transformation of lies into truth,” the book’s description says. “Readers will appreciate this frank approach, which provides valuable insight into the work of an artist. An important purchase for Spanish literature collections.”
According to the Associated Press, Vargas Llosa published his first collection of stories in 1959 and quickly established himself as one of the leaders of the “Boom” of Latin American writers in the 1960s and ‘70s with 1963’s “The Time of the Hero” and 1969’s “Conversation in the Cathedral” (Conversación en la Catedral).
His career also included writing for the La Crónica newspaper, working as a teacher in the Berlitz school in Paris and on the Spanish desk at Agence France-Presse in Paris. He published articles in the press for most of his life while writing dozens of fiction and non-fiction works.
According to the AP, he was also known for his political commentary as an early supporter of the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro before growing disillusioned and denouncing Castro and socialism. In a famous incident in Mexico City in 1976, Vargas Llosa punched fellow Nobel Prize winner and ex-friend García Márquez, whom he later ridiculed as “Castro’s courtesan.”
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was born March 28, 1936, in Peru’s southern city of Arequipa, high in the Andes at the foot of the Misti volcano. Vargas Llosa said his early life was “somewhat traumatic,” pampered by his mother and grandmother in a large house with servants, his every whim granted; his grandfather was the Peruvian consul in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
His father, Ernesto Vargas Maldonado, left the family before he was born, but Vargas Llosa learned he was still alive when he was 10 and his parents reconciled in Lima. Vargas Llosa described his father as a disciplinarian who viewed his son’s love of Jules Verne and writing poetry as surefire routes to starvation, and feared for his “manhood,” believing that “poets are always homosexuals.”
After failing to get the boy enrolled in a naval academy because he was underage, Vargas Llosa’s father sent him to Leoncio Prado Military Academy — an experience that was to stay with Vargas Llosa and led to “The Time of the Hero.” The book won the Spanish Critics Award.
The military academy “was like discovering hell,” Vargas Llosa said later.
He entered Peru’s San Marcos University to study literature and law, “the former as a calling and the latter to please my family, which believed, not without certain cause, that writers usually die of hunger.” After earning his literature degree in 1958, Vargas Llosa won a scholarship to pursue a doctorate in Madrid.
Vargas Llosa drew much of his inspiration from his Peruvian homeland, but preferred to live abroad, residing for spells each year in Madrid, New York and Paris.
His early novels revealed a Peruvian world of military arrogance and brutality, of aristocratic decadence, and of Stone Age Amazon Indians existing simultaneously with 20th-century urban blight.
“Peru is a kind of incurable illness and my relationship to it is intense, harsh and full of the violence of passion,” Vargas Llosa wrote in 1983.
After 16 years in Europe, he returned in 1974 to a Peru then ruled by a left-wing military dictatorship. “I realized I was losing touch with the reality of my country, and above all its language, which for a writer can be deadly,” he said.
In 1990, he ran for the presidency of Peru, a reluctant candidate in a nation torn apart by a messianic Maoist guerrilla insurgency and a basket-case, hyperinflation economy. He was defeated by a then-unknown university rector, Alberto Fujimori, who resolved much of the political and economic chaos but went on to become a corrupt and authoritarian leader in the process.
Vargas Llosa also used his literary talents to write several successful novels about the lives of real people, including French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin and his grandmother, Flora Tristan, in “The Way to Paradise” in 2003 and 19th-century Irish nationalist and diplomat Sir Roger Casement in “The Dream of the Celt” in 2010. His last published novel was “Harsh Times” (Tiempos Recios) in 2019 about a U.S.-backed coup d’etat in Guatemala in 1954.
He became a member of the Royal Spanish Academy in 1994 and held visiting professor and resident writer posts in more than a dozen colleges and universities across the world, including Syracuse University.
In his teens, Vargas Llosa joined a communist cell and eloped with and later married a 33-year-old Bolivian, Julia Urquidi — the sister-in-law of his uncle. He later drew inspiration from their nine-year marriage to write the hit comic novel “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter” (La Tía Julia y el Escribidor).
In 1965, he married his first cousin, Patricia Llosa, 10 years his junior, and together they had three children. They divorced 50 years later, and he started a relationship with Spanish society figure Isabel Preysler, former wife of singer Julio Iglesias and mother of singer Enrique Iglesias. They separated in 2022.
Vargas Llosa is survived by his children.
Their letter announcing his death said his remains will be cremated and there won’t be any public ceremony.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.