Mario Vargas Llosa, who helped to lead the Latin American “boom” of literary fiction in the 1960s, a burst of creativity and stylistic experimentation that produced some of the era’s most-acclaimed novels.
The Nobel Prize-winning author whose epic novels probed the moral depravity of authoritarian rule in Latin America and who envisaged literature as social reform had contested for the presidency in his native Peru.
Writing “is a way of living with illusion and joy and a fire throwing out sparks in your head, struggling with intractable words until you master them,” he said in his 2010 Nobel acceptance speech. “This is an experience that continues to bewitch me as it did the first time, as complete and dizzying as making love to the woman you love for days, weeks, months, without stopping.”
A great loss in literature, says Shajil Anthru, Chairman of KM Anthru Foundation, India.
