Mario Vargas Llosa. A Life

Dazzling and deeply researched, Gerald Martin provides a compelling account of the astonishing and profoundly contradictory life of Mario Vargas Llosa, a literary colossus.

When he died in April 2025, the Peruvian novelist and essayist Mario Vargas Llosa was internationally renowned and celebrated, and in the Spanish-speaking world unchallenged as its greatest living writer and most influential intellectual. He was also indisputably the most controversial: he was never out of the headlines in more than six decades of literary and political activity, from the moment he exploded onto the cultural scene in the early 1960s with his first novel, The Time of the Hero, until his last, I Give You My Silence, in 2023.

At first a declared socialist, he changed his mind about the meaning of 'freedom', made the long march through the ideologies and renounced collectivism of every kind until he ended up as a fiery and provocative supporter of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and the neoliberal individualism they espoused.

At nineteen he married an aunt, then replaced her with a teenage first cousin a decade later, only to abandon her in scandalous fashion after fifty years in favour of the most glamorous socialite in post-Franco Spain. He came within a whisker of the presidency of Peru, and in 2010 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature; but he also knocked his friend and rival Gabriel García Márquez to the ground with the most famous punch in literary history. Handsome, debonair and almost incomparably ambitious, energetic and determined, Vargas Llosa's personal life was as controversial as his politics.

'We already have his novels. And now, thankfully, we have this monumental work' Financial Times

'An outstanding achievement unlikely ever to be bettered' Literary Review

'Masterful ... An astonishing feat' Sunday Telegraph