Mario Vargas Llosa

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Mario Vargas Llosa's first novel, The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros, 1963), drew directly on his own adolescence as a cadet at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, portraying the school's brutality and corruption with enough specificity that the real academy's officers organized a public burning of a thousand copies of the book on the school grounds. The controversy drew international press attention to the young Peruvian writer and, alongside Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar and Carlos Fuentes, helped establish the Latin American Boom as a literary phenomenon foreign publishers and readers began actively seeking out.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In 1990, Mario Vargas Llosa ran for President of Peru at the head of a center right coalition, campaigning on a platform of free market economic reform, and lost the runoff election to Alberto Fujimori. He wrote about the campaign in the memoir A Fish in the Water (1993), which interweaves chapters on the 1990 election with chapters on his earlier life and literary career. Vargas Llosa remained politically outspoken for the rest of his life, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, cited for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt and defeat.