Mario Vargas Llosa has died at 89.

The Nobel Prize-winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, the last living titan of the Latin American literary “boom,” and one of the most influential writers of the Spanish-speakin…

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The Nobel Prize-winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, the last living titan of the Latin American literary “boom,” and one of the most influential writers of the Spanish-speaking world, died on Sunday at the age of 89.

His death was announced by his children, Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana Vargas Llosa, who wrote: “His departure will sadden his relatives, his friends, and his readers around the word, but we hope that they will find comfort, as we do, in the fact that he enjoyed a long, adventurous and fruitful life, and leaves behind a body of work that will outlive him.”

When he won Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, the Swedish Academy cited “his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” In his Nobel Lecture, the full text of which is well worth reading 15 years later, he said:

Without fictions we would be less aware of the importance of freedom for life to be livable, the hell it turns into when it is trampled underfoot by a tyrant, an ideology, or a religion. Let those who doubt that literature not only submerges us in the dream of beauty and happiness but alerts us to every kind of oppression, ask themselves why all regimes determined to control the behavior of citizens from cradle to grave fear it so much they establish systems of censorship to repress it and keep so wary an eye on independent writers. They do this because they know the risk of allowing the imagination to wander free in books, know how seditious fictions become when the reader compares the freedom that makes them possible and is exercised in them with the obscurantism and fear lying in wait in the real world. Whether they want it or not, know it or not, when they invent stories the writers of tales propagate dissatisfaction, demonstrating that the world is badly made and the life of fantasy richer than the life of our daily routine. This fact, if it takes root in their sensibility and consciousness, makes citizens more difficult to manipulate, less willing to accept the lies of the interrogators and jailers who would like to make them believe that behind bars they lead more secure and better lives.

Vargas Llosa’s career spanned over 50 years, but after publishing his 2023 novel Le dedico mi silencio (I Give You My Silence), he said it would be his last: “I’m 87 and, although I’m an optimist, I don’t think I’ll live long enough to work on a new novel, especially because it takes me three or four years to write one. But I’ll never stop working and I hope that I’ll have the strength to carry on until the end.”

Mario Vargas Llosa RIP

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