Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa passed away on April 14, 2025, at the age of 89.

The Nobel laureate died in Peru’s capital Lima, surrounded by his family and “at peace,” as son and political commentator Alvaro Vargas Llosa announced on X.

Rumors of Vargas Llosa’s declining health had circulated in recent months, during which he had largely stayed out of the public eye.

Vargas Llosa was a prominent figure in Latin America’s 1960s literary scene. He continued to produce novels and essays for decades, with his works translated into many languages.

Throughout his life, Vargas Llosa was honored with honorary doctorates, prizes, and awards worldwide. The most esteemed was undoubtedly the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, which the Swedish Academy awarded him for “his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”

“Life would be worse without the good books we’ve read; we’d be more conformist, less restless, more submissive. The critical spirit, progress’s engine, wouldn’t even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against life’s inadequacies,” Vargas Llosa said at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on December 7, 2010.

“Quality literature builds bridges between cultures, uniting us through the happiness, suffering, or surprise it evokes, beneath the barriers of languages, ideologies, habits, traditions, and prejudices that separate us,” he added.

In 2016, he became the first living Spanish-speaking author to be included in France’s Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, a prestigious collection of global classics translated into French. He was also elected to the renowned Academie Francaise in 2021.

A major voice in Latin American literature

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was born into a middle-class family on March 28, 1936, in Arequipa, Peru, , spending his early childhood in Bolivia before returning to Peru.

He attended a military academy in Lima as a teenager and started working as a local journalist. Vargas Llosa, who studied law and literature, began writing short stories later published in the late 1950s. He moved to Paris in 1959, living there for several years.

Set among the cadets of his former military school, Vargas Llosa’s debut novel, “The Time of the Hero” (La ciudad y los Perros), was immediately successful upon its 1963 release.

His second novel, “The Green House” (La Casa Verde), published three years later and also set in Peru, confirmed him as a key voice of Latin American literature.

Over several decades, he released many more works for readers, including the 1981 “The War of the End of the World” (La Guerra del Fin del Mundo) and the 2000 political thriller, “The Feast of the Goat” (La fiesta del Chivo).

Politically active and with Spanish nobility

The Peruvian writer resided in numerous cities worldwide, teaching at universities in the US, South America, and Europe.

Between 1976 and 1979, Vargas Llosa was the President of PEN International, an organization of writers.

Throughout his career, Vargas Llosa was politically active. Like many writers of his generation, he initially embraced Marxism but grew disillusioned with the movement and shifted towards liberal democracy.

He stood for the Peruvian presidency in 1990 without winning.

Gaining Spanish citizenship, King Juan Carlos I bestowed upon the writer the legal status of hereditary nobility with the title of Marquess of Vargas Llosa in 2011.

In a 2020 video interview with Louisiana Channel, a Danish website, the novelist warned about images replacing ideas in contemporary culture, finding this concerning, “since if images completely replace ideas, they will easily manipulate society.”

Personal life became tabloid news

Mario Vargas Llosa was married twice, with his second marriage to his first cousin, Patricia, lasting over 50 years.

In 2015, he became the tabloid media’s primary focus when his romance with Isabel Preysler, the ex-wife of singer Julio Iglesias and widow of Spain’s former economy minister Miguel Boyer, was made public. He left his wife Patricia after a 50-year marriage due to this relationship. Preysler and Vargas Llosa parted ways in 2022.

A curious cosmopolitan

“Vargas Llosa is a curious cosmopolitan with a clear interest in global phenomena and actively participates in them. That’s why he ran for Peru’s presidency or why, at his age, he continues to passionately write about issues in Venezuela or Mexico,” said Jürgen Dormagen, a long-time editor of Vargas Llosa’s work at the German Suhrkamp publisher, occasion of the Nobel laureate’s 80th birthday.

In 2019, the author published his latest novel, “Harsh Times” (Tiempos Recios), about the 1954 coup in Guatemala.

The acclaimed writer’s first children’s book, “Fonchito and the Moon,” appeared in 2022. That year, he also shared with CNN that he was working on a novel about Peruvian popular music.

Mario Vargas Llosa once quoted his ex-wife Patricia, “Mario, the only thing you’re good for is writing.”

He took it as a compliment and noted that he dedicated most of his time to what he described as, in Stockholm in 2010, “the passion, the vice, the marvel of writing.”

Editorial note by Elizabeth Grenier