Author of the week: Mario Vargas Llosa

last updated 8 January 2015

Once again, the Nobel Prize for literature has been awarded to a writer who is outspoken in his political views, said Reed Johnson in the Los Angeles Times. But novelist and playwright Mario Vargas Llosa is harder to pigeonhole than many previous winners. Once a youthful admirer of Fidel Castro, he later became a center-right presidential candidate in his native Peru, opposing both the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas and the right-wing Alberto Fujimori. In novels such as 2000’s Feast of the Goat, he’s analyzed the authoritarian streak in Latin American politics. “I have always been very critical of all kinds of dictatorships, dictatorship from the left, dictatorship from the right,” he said last week. “I have criticized the Cuban dictatorship as I criticized the Chilean dictatorship.”

Though Vargas Llosa never won Peru’s top office, he remains hugely influential throughout the Spanish-speaking world, said Ian James in the Associated Press. Recently, he blasted Venezuela’s leftist leader, Hugo Chávez, for his heavy-handed power grabs. “That trend, which is an authoritarian, anti-democratic trend, is a trend that seems on its way out,” Vargas Llosa said. The author no longer has an interest in political office, but argues that a writer—particularly in Latin America—has an obligation to participate in public debate. “Literature is an expression of life,” he said, “and you cannot eradicate politics from life even if you think that politics is in many ways a disgusting, a dirty activity.”