The prolific Peruvian novelist and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa has died aged 89. Vargas Llosa’s death of Sunday was confirmed by his children, who announced on social media that he had “passed away peacefully... surrounded by his family.” Vargas Llosa won international acclaim with two early novels—La Ciudad y los Perros (The Time of the Hero) in 1963 and La Casa Verde (The Green House) in 1966—and went on to become one of the most prominent writers of the “Latin American Boom.” In 2010, Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” His last work was published in 2023, titled Le Dedico mi Silencio (I Give You My Silence), after which he announced he was finished writing novels. Vargas Llosa also dabbled in politics throughout his life, running unsuccessfully for the Peruvian presidency in 1990 as a liberal after starting out as a left-wing activist.
