Nobel Prize, Francophile and committed man… Mario Vargas Llosa died at the age of 89

His disappearance marks the end of an era. Nobel Prize in literature in 2010 and member of the French Academy since 2021, the Hispano-Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa died this Sunday in Lima at the age of 89. In the 1960s and 1970s, he had been one of the great protagonists of the Boom of Latin American Letters around the world, with the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Argentinian Julio Cortazar.

“It is with deep sadness, that we announce that our father, Mario Vargas Llosa, died today in Lima, surrounded by his family and in peace”announced his son Alvaro in a message on X, also signed by his brother Gonzalo and his sister Morgana. If the family did not specify the causes of his death, the health of the writer was fragile since his return to Lima in 2024, after his departure from Madrid.

He had become a writer in France

At the announcement of its death, the Peruvian government has a day of “National mourning on April 14” “ And announced the milestone of flags on public buildings. “His intellectual genius and his vast work will remain a lasting heritage for future generations”reacted to X, the president of Peru Dina Boluarte.

Translated into around thirty languages, this Francophile author, who lived in Paris for several years, was the first foreign writer to enter during his lifetime in the prestigious collection of the Pléiade in 2016. He had been elected to the French Academy in 2021, arousing a controversy since he had exceeded the limited age fixed in the statutes.

If he studied there and first undertook a journalist career, it was in Paris that Mario Vargas Llosa said he was “Having become a writer”he admitted by delivering his entry speech into the prestigious institution on February 9, 2023. In 1959, the year of his 23 years, he settled there with his first wife, Julia Urquidi, who will inspire him The Tante Julia et le Scribouillard.

The author lives several years in the French capital, where he sometimes works in the translation, sometimes as a Spanish teacher or journalist, in the Spanish-speaking service of the France-Presse agency. It was in the Light city that he wrote his first novel, The city and the dogsthe story of four boys who fight against the terrible discipline of their college.

An ideological evolution that disturbs

If Mario Vargas Llosa was admired for his description of social realities, he was also criticized by South American intellectual circles for his conservative positions. Close to the social causes and the communist movement during his student years in the 1950s, a time seduced a time by Fidel Castro with which he distanced himself in 1971, Mario Vargas Llosa moved away from leftist ideas in the 1980s, becoming the megaphone of liberal ideas in Peru.

Faced with the attempts of the social government-democrat of President Alan García to nationalize the banking system, in 1987 he led the demonstrations against this measure, thus marking the start of his political career. In 1990, he presented himself in the presidential election under the label of the Democratic Front. Favorite of the ballot, he lost to an agronomist engineer then almost unknown, Alberto Fujimori.

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After his defeat, he moved to Madrid and continued his literary work, while remaining attentive to Peruvian and international politics. In recent years, he had tackled populism, which he had described as “Democracy disease”by including Chavism and Castrism as well as the extreme right, the European radical left or Catalan independence nationalism.