Peruvian · 1936–2025
Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 for "his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." The Peruvian author burst onto the scene with "The Time of the Hero" (1963), which the military academy it satirized publicly burned. "Conversation in The Cathedral" (1969) dissects Peruvian dictatorship through intercut conversations. "The War of the End of the World" (1981) reimagines a Brazilian millenarian revolt. Vargas Llosa ran for president of Peru in 1990 and lost; he has continued writing novels, essays, and plays into his late eighties.