The Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa was a bestselling, dextrous novelist who had no shame in using episodes from his colourful life as the basis for his prizewinning fiction.
When, at 19, he eloped with his uncle’s sister-in-law, the ensuing marriage served as the inspiration for his comic masterpiece, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977). A man of patrician good looks, once compared to “a dark-eyed John Travolta”, he had a roving eye. He abandoned his first wife for her niece, who happened to also be his cousin. An appreciation of sex is reflected in his fiction, including his graphic novel, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (1997).
His debut novel, The Time of the Hero (1963) was set in the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, a real institution. Vargas Llosa had been dispatched there as a teenager by his violent father, and he did not bother to change the academy’s name in the novel.
Occasionally, however, he seemed to muddle the boundary between real life and fantasy. When he stood for election as president of Peru in 1990, Vargas Llosa declared this was “writing the great novel in real life”.
To his bitter disappointment, he lost his presidential bid to Alberto Fujimori. In the Hispanic world, however, Vargas Llosa was almost as famous for his political dallying as his novels.
A communist in his youth, he was never forgiven by Latin America’s left-wing intelligentsia for changing his mind about Castro’s Cuba, after discovering any Cuban artist, poet or writer who failed to use creativity solely to exalt “the revolution” was at risk of sanctions, including imprisonment. This made Vargas Llosa outspoken as an advocate for democracy, and in interviews he railed against corrupt, centralised South American states.
His shift to the right was sealed at a 1982 dinner party with Margaret Thatcher, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the poet Philip Larkin, held at the house of the historian Hugh Thomas. Vargas Llosa subsequently developed what he termed “Andean Thatcherism”. This belief in the liberating virtue of the free market formed the basis for his campaign to be president of Peru. When Thatcher left office in 1990, Vargas Llosa sent her flowers and a note which read: “Madam: there are not enough words in the dictionary to thank you for what you have done for the cause of liberty.”
His fiction often had a political hue, exploring subjects including colonialism, the social impact of left-wing ideology and life under dictatorships. His masterly novel The Feast of the Goat (2000) is a spine-chiller set in the Dominican Republic during the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo.
A disciple of Gustave Flaubert, Vargas Llosa would spend hours meticulously structuring the plots of his novels. His style tended to the baroque, with long, complex sentences: “The writer in English closest to his style is William Faulkner, who influenced so many of the Latin American writers,” said Edith Grossman, who translated his work into English, in 2010.
That year, he won the Nobel prize for literature and was lauded for “his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”. Vargas Llosa was 74. Perhaps fearing a dull old age, he later abandoned his second wife days after a vast party to mark their golden wedding.
The pages of ¡Hola! gave extensive coverage to his new romance with Isabel Preysler, a Filipina former model known as the “Pearl of Manila” and the mother of the singer Enrique Iglesias. She was 67. He was 79. The relationship became public on the front page of the celebrity magazine, and Vargas Llosa became the star of ¡Hola! photoshoots with Preysler. As a story it was beyond satire: he was renowned for his essays pouring scorn on celebrity culture.
In 2022 the couple split up. She announced the news through the pages of the magazine, where her appearances were so regular that her daughter dubbed the publication “the family photo album”. ¡Hola! claimed the writer’s jealousy had prompted the separation.
Vargas Llosa said their worlds were incompatible: stories circulated that he had resented visiting Iglesias at his mansion in Miami and finding it full of tennis courts — his partner is the former tennis player Anna Kournikova — yet without a room suitable for writing.
The first photo of Vargas Llosa after his separation from Preysler showed him reading Madame Bovary in French, surrounded by his grown-up children.
In February 2023 Vargas Llosa was invested as the first “immortel” or member of the Académie Française to never have written directly in French.
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa, Peru’s second city, in 1936, and spent his childhood in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where his maternal grandfather was the Peruvian consul. Every night before bed, Mario kissed a photograph of his father, a radio operator called Ernesto Vargas. He was told Ernesto was dead. In fact, he was merely divorced from Mario’s mother, Dora.
When Mario was 11, Ernesto unexpectedly resurfaced, demanding that Dora and Mario should return to Lima. Ernesto was violent towards Dora — who later remarried him — and terrorised Mario, who turned to reading and writing fiction as a refuge from his fear and unhappiness.
Ernesto declared his son’s literary leanings “a route to starvation, or worse still, proof of homosexuality”. He dispatched his 14-year-old son to the Leoncio Prado Military Academy, where he witnessed brutality, racism and class tensions.
The Time of the Hero, based on his experiences at the academy won the 1962 Biblioteca Breve prize in Barcelona. Its publication in Peru sparked outrage, perhaps due to graphic scenes including the gang rape of a chicken. A thousand copies were burnt by the administrators of the academy. Peru’s generals asked if Mario had been bribed to write the book by Ecuador.
“My hatred of authoritarianism comes from my hatred of life under my father’s authority,” Vargas Llosa would later explain. Ernesto threatened to shoot Mario, when his son eloped with Julia Urquidi, a Bolivian woman 13 years Mario’s senior. For good measure, Ernesto volunteered to shoot her too. “To have an affair with an older woman was very exciting,” Vargas Llosa said.
His subsequent novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter was later adapted by William Boyd as the Hollywood film Tune in Tomorrow (1990). By then Urquidi had retaliated against his portrayal of their relationship with her own memoir titled What Little Vargas Didn’t Say. She claimed she had “made him” and that: “He had the talent, I made the sacrifices.”
The couple divorced after Vargas Llosa abandoned Urquidi for her 16-year-old niece, Patricia. After marrying, he had three children with Patricia: Álvaro, a political commentator and writer, Morgana, who is a photographer, and Gonzalo, who is the UN Refugee Agency’s representative to the UK.
They spent part of their childhood in London, where Vargas Llosa taught Spanish-American literature at King’s College London. A keen Anglophile, he declared London the world’s “most civilised capital”, but was persuaded to move to Barcelona to concentrate on writing fiction by Carmen Balcells, (obituary, September 28, 2015) the feisty Catalan agent to the stars of the Latin American “boom”, including the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez.
Day to day, Patricia took charge of the family’s practical needs, shielding her husband from curious journalists, as he let his imagination rip in long, masterly novels such as The War of the End of the World (1981), a saga set in 19th-century Brazil.
His reputation as a gripping storyteller had long been established by early novels, such as Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), which was inspired by his days as a student communist while reading law and literature at San Marcos university in Lima. Vargas Llosa framed this devastating critique of society in 1950s Peru as a drunken encounter between a reporter estranged from his upper-class family, and their former chauffeur, in a bar called the Cathedral.
Often his technique relied on the sharp juxtaposition of scenes so as to build up narrative layers and give several perspectives of the same event. Thus he reveals the gap between public image and internal truth, whether pertaining to an individual, an institution or a government.
For Vargas Llosa, the novel was essentially subversive, a method to liberate the imagination of the reader, and thus protect them from being manipulated from the propaganda of ruling elites.
However, he eschewed the diatribes which mar much politically motivated Latin American literature. Neither did he countenance simple explanations for the problems of his continent, saying, “I distrust the idea that you can build a paradise here in history. That idea of a perfect society lies behind monsters like the Taliban.”
By the 1980s, he was involved in the politics of Peru, and linked to the Popular Action party of Fernando Belaúnde (president of Peru 1963-8 and 1980-5). Belaúnde showered Vargas Llosa with offers of ambassadorships and ministerial positions, including that of prime minister.
He shunned them all, but felt he had no alternative but to enter politics after despairing at Peru’s problems, ranging from economic stagnation to the terrorism of the Shining Path, a group of Maoist guerrillas. He founded a political movement called Freedom, based on neo-liberal economic policies. He also held liberal moral beliefs on abortion rights and the legalisation of cannabis.
His enemies accused him of parroting the political stance of the much-hated United States. When he failed to be elected as president, Vargas Llosa turned his attention once more towards writing and journalism.
As a writer, he was self-disciplined and prolific. As well as plays and political essays, he was noted for his fine monographs on Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Juan Carlos Onetti and Márquez, who he once had a fight with in a cinema. He also wrote his own plays, starring in some when in his seventies.
Vargas Llosa’s intellectual curiosity was insatiable. His essays and articles spanned everything from football — about which he was passionate — to the history of philosophy. One of his heroes was André Malraux, the French writer who always seemed to be present at the key moments of 20th-century history. In that spirit Vargas Llosa reported from Iraq soon after the invasion in his Diary about Iraq (2003). Two collections of his journalism have been published in English as Making Waves (1996) and Touchstones (2007). He had a regular column in El Pais.
Although he was likeable and charming, interviewers found him self-contained. He might smile with every utterance, even laugh, but behind the polished, formal air and social grace lurked demons: “If I didn’t write, I would blow my brains out, without a shadow of a doubt,” he once declared.
In 2010, he wrote The Dream of the Celt, a fictionalised biography of Sir Roger Casement, who went to the Congo with Henry Morgan Stanley. This was freighted with research and commentaries on colonialism. He won the Nobel prize the same year and thanked his wife Patricia at the ceremony, describing her as “the cousin with a little snub nose and indomitable character”, who organised his diary, praised his writing and prepared his suitcases.
In 2015, he abandoned Patricia for the socialite Preysler. Sniping headlines referred to “Viagras Llosa and Elvis’s daughter”. Some thought it distasteful that the writer moved his bust of Balzac and his books into the library of the Madrid mansion Presyler had built with her third husband, the Spanish finance minister, Miguel Boyer. He had died less than a year before her romance with Vargas Llosa.
By then, the writer bore the title The First Marquess of Vargas Llosa, granted him by King Juan Carlos of Spain a few years earlier. His relationship with his native Peru was fractious: some of his compatriots felt he had rejected Peru by accepting a Spanish passport. Other accounts alleged Vargas Llosa had nearly lost his Peruvian citizenship after the presidential election episode.
There was a sense of scores being paid in his last novel, The Neighbourhood (published in English in 2018), an exploration of how tabloids in the pay of government could destroy the scions of Peru’s high society. The same year he published Sabers and Utopias, an anthology of political essays, discussing the legacy of Castro, Pinochet and “Baby Doc” Duvalier, which was dismissed by The New York Times as “all but unreadable”.
By then he had divorced Patricia, who survives him along with their children. Vargas Llosa’s complex character was often described in contrasting adjectives: arrogant, humble, charming, childish. This contradiction was surely one he would have exploited deftly in his clever, gripping masterpieces.
Mario Vargas Llosa, First Marquess of Vargas Llosa, writer, was born on March 28, 1936. He died on April 13, 2025, aged 89
