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Mario Vargas Llosa was born on 28 March 1936 and his parents separated a few months before he was born. For this reason, Llosa spent his early childhood living with his maternal grandparents and his mother, who told him that his father had died because she did not want to explain her separation from him. In 1946, Llosa’s father returned and his parents they reconciled.
Llosa discovered his passion for writing during his adolescence, his mother and grandparents supported him in this area, while his father was against writing practices. Writing in his class was considered an activity of the rich and those who did not want to work hard in life.
His father sent him to the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima to prevent him from becoming became a writer, then Losa described this experience as “the discovery of hell”.
Llosa’s first novel, ‘The time of the hero’ is based on his traumatic experiences in this academy, he was condemned by the Peruvian military leaders, who in retaliation burned 800 Copies of the book in the courtyard of Leoncio Prado.
Llosa had started working as a journalist a year before graduating from Leoncio. After leaving the academy, Llosa completed his studies in Piura and worked as a journalist in a local newspaper. In 1953 Llosa entered the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos where he studied Letters and Law. .
On 1955 he married Julia Urquidi, ten years older than him. The marriage, however, ended in divorce at 1964. A year later, Llosa married his cousin, Patricia Llosa, with whom he had 3 children.
Starting his literary career with ‘The time of the hero’ in 1963, Mario Vargas Llosa was identified as a social critic and writer.
The novel won a good number of literary prizes in Europe.
The success was followed by two more novels, ‘La casa verde’ (1969) and ‘Conversation in the cathedral’ (1981). Eight years later, Llosa’s most internationally acclaimed work arrived, ‘La tía Julia y el guionista’, which was an autobiographical account of his first marriage . Before writing his first police novel, ‘Who killed Palomino Molera’ in 1984, Llosa wrote two novels overtly political titles titled ‘The War of the End of the World’ (1981) and ‘The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta’ (1984).
Some of his latest books include Death in the Andes (1996), Cuadernos de Don Rigoberto (1998), The Feast of the Goat (2002), Road to Paradise (2003), The Bad Girl ( 2003) and Celta’s dream (2022). The non-fiction work of Mario Vargas Llosa has been collected in Against Wind and Tide, which has been published in three volumes.
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