Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-2025): The end of an era for Latin America’s literary luminaries

The death of Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa (1936–2025) marks the end of a Golden Age of Latin American literature. Just as there will not be another generation in Spain like that of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, Góngora and Quevedo, in America there will not be another like that of Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier and Carlos Fuentes.

Vargas Llosa’s unparalleled awareness of his craft made him perhaps the most accomplished writer among his contemporaries. His discipline to writing, and to doing so impeccably, was absolute.

I interviewed him several times, and visited almost all of his libraries, where he worked, in London, Madrid, New York and Peru. The physical order of his working environments was comparable only to the mental order with which he wrote, which was rooted in an obsessively correct use of time.

He never received visitors in the mornings, and in the afternoons, he rarely attended to guests before 6 or 7 o’clock. He was convinced that genius is not natural, but the fruit of effort and tenacity, as he wrote in his Letters to a Young Novelist.

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This ascetic and forceful ethos was etched...

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