Letters to a Young Novelist (Spanish: Cartas a un joven novelista) is a non-fiction book by the Nobel Prize-winning Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, published in 1997.

[1] An English translation by Natasha Wimmer was published in 2001.

[2] Following in the footsteps of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, Vargas Llosa in Letters to a Young Novelist discusses important tools and techniques of writing in eleven essays, in some cases using a classic text as an example, using letters as an organizational principle.

[3] However, unlike in Rilke's book, the "young novelist" of the title is generally understood to be a conceit; there is no intended recipient other than the reader.

[4] The eleven essays (and postscript) of the book are titled as follows: This article about a non-fiction book is a stub.