Mario Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian-Spanish author, essayist, journalist, and former politician. Regarded as one of Latin America’s most prominent novelists and one of the leading authors of his generation, Vargas Llosa received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 for his “cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” He has written more than 30 novels, plays, and essays, and his works have been translated into more than 40 different languages. Initially a supporter of Fidel Castro and a student of Marxism, Vargas Llosa wrote to Castro to protest the imprisonment of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971. Vargas Llosa then became an outspoken critic of authoritarian regimes. In 1987, he helped form and lead the Movimiento Libertad in Peru. Since 1990, Vargas Llosa has published a column in the Spanish daily El País.
