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BIOGRAPHY
of Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario
Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America’s — and
the world’s — greatest writers. He was born
in Arequipa, Peru, attended the University of San Marcos
in Lima, and earned a doctorate from the University of
Madrid.
His
many novels include The Green House, Conversation in
the Cathedral, Aunt Julia and the Script Writer, The War
of the End of the World, The Storyteller, In Praise of
the Stepmother, Death in the Andes, The Notebooks of Don
Rigeborto, and, more recently, The Feast of the
Goat and The Way to Paradise. He is also the author
of A Fish in the Water — a memoir of his
foray into Peruvian politics when he lost a bitter 1990
presidential election to Alberto Fujimori. In 1995, Vargas
Llosa was awarded two of the world's most distinguished
literary honors, the Cervantes Prize and the Jerusalem
Prize.
Throughout
his career, Vargas Llosa has been fascinated by the relationship
between literature and history. Many of his novels are
historical. In a series of three lectures, Vargas Llosa
will explore this complex relationship, using three of
his novels as illustrations: Conversation in the Cathedral,
which is set in Peru against the background of the military
dictatorship of General Odria (1948-1956); The War
of the End of the World, which retells the civil war
in Canudos, Brazil, precipitated by the messianic rebellion
of the Conselheiro in Bahia (1903); and The Feast of
the Goat, which treats the dictatorship of Generalisimo
Trujillo in the Dominican Republic (1930-1961). |
