Unlock the publisher's digest free
Roula Khalaf, editor -in -chief of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, an imposing figure in Latin American literature, died Sunday in Lima, the capital of his country, at the age of 89.
The public writer and intellectual, who won the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature, was “surrounded by his family and in peace,” his family wrote in a statement published by his son Álvaro on X on Sunday.
“His death will attack his loved ones, his friends and his readers from the whole world, but we hope they will find comfort, as we have done, in the fact that he appreciated a long, varied and fruitful life, and leaves behind a work body that will survive him,” said the press release.
The cause of the death was unknown, and the family said that the body of Vargas Llosa would be cremated in accordance with its wishes, adding that there would be no public ceremony.
Vargas Llosa was a major figure of Latin American boom, a literary movement in the 1960s and 1970s, alongside Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, Carlos Fuentes from Mexico and his colleague Nobel Colombia Gabriel García Márquez.
His best known works include the 1969 novel Conversation in the cathedral, who examined the Peruvian society in the 1950s under the military dictatorship of Manuel Odría, and is often considered his masterpiece.
In 2000 The goat feast, Vargas Llosa put her pen to the heritage of the Dominican tyrant Rafael Trujillo, while his semi-autobiographical work Aunt Julia and the screenwriter, Posted in 1977, included elements of humor and romance.
During the Vargas Llosa award The Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, the Swedish Academy congratulated “its cartography of power structures and its sharp images of the resistance, revolt and defeat of the individual”.
In addition to his literary achievements, Vargas Llosa was also involved in politics, presenting a liberal candidate for the Peruvian presidency in 1990, when he lost against the authoritarian Alberto Fujimori.
Fujimori, who died in SeptemberThere remains a controversial figure in Peru, which he transformed during his reign of decade, expanding his economy with free market reforms and putting a campaign to eliminate leftist guerrillas. Fujimori was finally accused of corruption and human rights violations and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
After his electoral defeat, Vargas Llosa spent more time in Spain, taking Spanish citizenship in 1993. In 2011, he was made a marquis, A row of nobility high, by King Juan Carlos.
While Vargas Llosa did not look for a public service, he remained an active commentator of the policy in Peru and abroad, and supported the presidents of center-right, including Mauricio Macri d'Argentine and Sebastián Piñera of Chile.
Despite the initial support of the revolutionary Cuban leader Fidel Castro in the 1960s, Vargas Llosa was then fiercely critical of the communist dictator, as well as the late man on the left of Venezuela Hugo Chávez.
