Mario Vargas Llosa
With novels including The War of the End of the World, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto and The Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa has established an international reputation as one of the Latin America's most important authors.
He was born in Peru in 1936 and educated at university in Lima, where he studied Humanities and Law. Later, a scholarship took him to Madrid and, having gained his PhD, he moved to Paris not knowing that he would live and work in Europe for the next eighteen years. He returned to Lima in 1974, although he makes regular trips to Europe.
Always politically outspoken, from 1976 to 1979 Llosa served as President of PEN. His deep commitment to free expression is frequently reflected in the politically charged nature of his books, which have aroused the anger of the right and the left wing alike.
A man of diverse interests, he is a playwright and his critical studies of Garcia Marquez, Flaubert, Sartre and Camus are internationally respected. He has also produced and hosted 'The Tower of Babel', the Peruvian television show that looks at every aspect of Latin American culture from Borges to boxing. A football fanatic, he covered the 1982 World Cup for Peru.
In 1983 he presided over the commission which investigated the deaths of eight journalists, killed in Ayacucho during the Belaunde Government's campaign against the Maoist guerrila movement, the Sendero Luminoso. Having once declined the Prime Ministership of Peru in 1984, he was a candidate in the 1990 Presidential elections.
Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Ritz Paris Hemingway Award in March 1985 for The War of the End of the World and the Neil Gunn International Fellowship in 1986. In 2010 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Books by Mario Vargas Llosa
The War of the End of the World
Mario Vargas Llosa
The War of the End of the World is one of the great modern historical novels. Inspired by a real episode in Brazilian history, Mario Vargas Llosa tells the story ...
The Feast of the Goat
Mario Vargas Llosa
Urania Cabral, a New York lawyer, returns to the Dominican Republic after a lifelong self-imposed exile. Once she is back in her homeland, the elusive feeling of terror that has ...
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario is an eighteen-year-old law student and radio news editor who falls in love with his 32-year-old divorced 'Aunt' Julia, the wife of his cousin. Their scandalous affair is interwoven ...
The Dream of the Celt
Mario Vargas Llosa
As The Dream of the Celt opens, it is the summer of 1916 and Roger Casement awaits the hangman in London's Pentonville Prison. Dublin lies in ruins after the ...
The Bad Girl
Mario Vargas Llosa
Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as 'Lily' in Lima in 1950, when she arrives one summer out of the ...
Death in the Andes
Mario Vargas Llosa
Set in an isolated, run down community in the Peruvian Andes, Vargas Llosa's riveting novel tells the story of a series of mysterious disappearances involving the Shining Path guerrillas ...
The Way to Paradise
Mario Vargas Llosa
'In Mario Vargas Llosa's latest novel there are two stories - that of Paul Gauguin, the Post-Impressionist painter, and that of Paul Gauguin's grandmother, Flora Tristan . . . what makes the ...
The Time of the Hero
Mario Vargas Llosa
The Time of the Hero has been acclaimed by critics around the world as one of the outstanding Spanish novels of recent decades. In the author's native Peru, this ...
In Praise of the Stepmother
Mario Vargas Llosa
In Praise of the Stepmother is a witty and subtle meditation on the mysterious nature of human happiness and the corrupting power of innocence.
The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto
Mario Vargas Llosa
Don Rigoberto - a rather grey insurance executive by day, a dedicated pornographer and sexual enthusiast by night - misses Lucrecia, his estranged second wife. He desperately compensates for her absence by ...
The Cubs and Other Stories
Mario Vargas Llosa
The Cubs and Other Stories is Mario Vargas Llosa's only volume of short fiction available in English. Vargas Llosa's domain is the Peru of male youth and machismo, where life's ...
The Storyteller
Mario Vargas Llosa
A visitor from Peru, happening upon an exhibition of photographs from the Amazon jungle in an obscure Florentine picture gallery, finds his attention drawn to a picture of a tribal ...
A Fish in the Water
Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa's A Fish in the Water is a twofold book: a memoir by one of Latin America's most celebrated writers, beginning with his birth in 1936 in Arequipa, ...
Three Plays
Mario Vargas Llosa
A collection of Vargas Llosa's plays exploring the central theme of his work - how and why stories come into being and the relationship between fact and fiction.
The three ...
Touchstones
Mario Vargas Llosa
Fantastically intelligent, inspired and surprising, Touchstones is a landmark collection of essays from one of the world's leading writers and intellectuals.
One of Latin America's most garlanded writers ...
Making Waves: Essays 1962-93
Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa has been making waves in cultural and political spheres for over thirty years. Making Waves presents for the first time in English a collection of his essays ...
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