LIMA: Peru­vian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who enchanted readers with his intellectual rigour and lyrical prose for five decades and nearly became president of his country, died on Sunday aged 89.

He died in the country’s capital Lima surrounded by his family and “at peace”, his son Alvaro Vargas Llosa, a well-known political commentator, said on X.

A leading light in the 20th-century Latin American literature boom, Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2010 for works like Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Death in the Andes, and The War of the End of the World. But early on he abandoned the socialist ideas that were embraced by many of his peers, and his dabbling in politics and conservative views annoyed much of Latin America’s leftist intellectual class.

In 1990, he ran for president of Peru, saying he wanted to save his country from economic chaos and a Marxist insurgency. He lost in the runoff to Alberto Fujimori.

Frustrated by his loss, the writer moved to Spain but remained influential in Latin America, harshly criticising a new wave of strident leftist leaders led by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.

In his dozens of novels, plays and essays, Vargas Llosa told stories from various viewpoints and experimented with form-moving back and forth in time and switching narrators.

His work crossed genres and established him as a foundational figure in a generation of writers that led a resurgence in Latin American literature in the 1960s.

His books often examined the unnerving relationships between leaders and their subjects.

Published in Dawn, April 15th, 2025