The Spanish-Peruvian Nobel Prize winner for literature Mario Vargas Llosa, 87, has been hospitalized since Saturday for covid-19, for the second time in fifteen months, his children reported Monday.
“He is being treated by excellent professionals and accompanied by his family,” they added, asking “the media to respect his privacy at this time.”
In view of the media’s interest in our father’s state of health, we make public that he has been hospitalized since Saturday after being diagnosed with Covid-19. He is being treated by excellent professionals and accompanied by his family. We urge the media…
— Álvaro Vargas Llosa (@AlvaroVargasLl) July 3, 2023
The children did not specify where the writer is hospitalized, who has had Spanish nationality since 1993 and habitually resides in Madrid, where he was hospitalized for a few days for covid in April 2022.
It is worth remembering that Vargas Llosa was one of the great protagonists of the “Latin American boom”, together with the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, the Argentine Julio Cortázar or the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, a literary phenomenon that in the 1960s and 1970s became known in the whole world to these then young creators.
Born in the southern Peruvian city of Arequipa on March 28, 1936 into a middle-class family, Vargas Llosa was educated by his mother and maternal grandparents in Cochabamba (Bolivia) and later in Peru.
It should be noted that his long literary career came to the fore in 1959, when he published his first book of short stories, ‘Los jefes’, with which he won the Leopoldo Alas Award. But he gained notoriety with the publication of the novel ‘The City and the Dogs’, in 1963, followed three years later by ‘The Green House’. His prestige was consolidated with his novel ‘Conversation in the Cathedral’ (1969).
They followed later ‘Pantaleon and the visitors’, ‘Aunt Julia and the writer’, ‘The war at the end of the world‘, ‘Who killed Palomino Molero?’, ‘Lituma in the Andes’ and ‘The fish in the water’ ‘ (memoirs of his electoral campaign), ‘La fiesta del Chivo’ or ‘El sueño del celta’, published shortly before receiving the Nobel Prize in 2010.