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Mario Vargas Llosa, also known as Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa, was a Peruvian politician, writer, journalist, and novelist. Vargas Llosa was a prominent writer of his generation and one of the most important novels and essayists in Latin America.
Biography
Mario Vargas Llosa was born on 28 March 1936 in the southern Peruvian provincial city of Arequipa to Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Llosa Ureta.
Vargas Llosa’s father enrolled him in Lima’s Leoncio Prado Military Academy when he was fourteen years old. Vargas Llosa started working as a journalist for local newspapers at the age of sixteen, before graduating. After leaving the military academy, he completed his education in Piura, where he worked for the local newspaper, La Industria, and witnessed his first dramatic piece, La Huida del Inca, performed.
Vargas Llosa studied law and literature at the National University of San Marcos in Lima in 1953, during the Manuel A. OdrÃa administration.
In 1963, Vargas Llosa’s first book, The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros), was released. Based on the author’s personal experiences in Lima’s Leoncio Prado Military Academy, the book is set among a group of cadets in a military school.
The Green House (La casa verde), Vargas Llosa’s second book, was released in 1965. It tells the story of a brothel named “The Green House” and how its almost legendary presence impacts the lives of its patrons.
When Vargas Llosa was 33 years old, his third book, Conversation in the Cathedral (Conversación en La Catedral), was released in 1969. This grandiose story tells the tale of Santiago Zavala, a government minister’s son, and his driver, Ambrosio.
In 2003, he wrote The Way to Paradise, in which he studied Flora Tristan and Paul Gauguin.
He examined Paul Gauguin and Flora Tristan in his 2003 book The Way to Paradise.
Journalist Kathryn Harrison contends that Vargas Llosa’s 2006 work, The Bad Girl (Travesuras de la niña mala), is a reworking (rather than merely a recycling) of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856).
In Vargas Llosa’s adaptation, the story revolves around the narrator, a Peruvian exile living in Paris, and his decades-long fixation with a woman he fell in love with when they were both youths.
He wrote a book about the 1954 coup in Guatemala called Tiempos Recios (Harsh Times), which was published in 2019. Vargas Llosa declared in 2023 that he would publish his last book, Le dedico mi silencio (I Give You My Silence), and then go into retirement.
Mario Vargas Llosa’s Wife
Vargas Llosa divorced Patricia Llosa, his second wife, in 2015 and started dating Isabel Preysler, a Filipina Spanish socialite and television personality. It was revealed that Vargas Llosa and Preysler had broken up in December 2022. However, there is no information about his first wife.
What was Mario Vargas Llosa’s Cause of Death?
Vargas Llosa died on 13 April 2025 in Lima at the age of 89. However, the cause of Dea has not been revealed.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Vargas_Llosa
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/books/mario-vargas-llosa-dead.html
