Peruvian-Spanish writer and Nobel Prize recipient Mario Vargas Llosa passed away on April 13, according to his family. He was 89.
“It is with deep sorrow that we announce that our father, Mario Vargas Llosa, passed away peacefully in Lima today, surrounded by his family,” his son and known political commentator, Álvaro Vargas Llosa, said on X.
On Nov. 7, 2016, Llosa visited UST and delivered a lecture at the Buenaventura Garcia Paderes O.P. (BGPOP) building, after which he was named “honorary professor” by the University on account of being a “divinely gifted storyteller.”
“His departure will sadden friends, relatives and readers around the world,” the statement said. “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 a body of work that will outlive him.”
Llosa was known for his novels including “The Time of the Hero” (1963), “The Green House” (1966), “Conversation in the Cathedral” (1969) and “The War of the End of the World” (1981).
He also wrote essays, many of which are compiled in his collection, “Making Waves” (1996).
In 1990, he ran for president of Peru, but lost to Alberto Fujimori. He later moved to Spain and became a Spanish citizen in 1993.
A year later, he received the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious accolade in Spanish-language literature.
On Oct. 7, 2010, Llosa was awarded the Nobel prize in literature for what the Swedish Academy said was “his cartography of structures and power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.”
Llosa gave his Nobel lecture on Dec. 7 of that same year at the Swedish Academy, Stockholm, titled, “In Praise of Reading and Fiction,” which can be viewed and read in full at nobelprize.org.
