[12] He was the only child of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Llosa Ureta (the former a radio operator in an aviation company, the latter the daughter of an old criollo family), who separated a few months before his birth.

[24] Vargas Llosa began his literary career in earnest, in 1957, with the publication of his first short stories, "The Leaders" ("Los jefes") and "The Grandfather" ("El abuelo"), while working for two Peruvian newspapers.

The main plot follows Bonifacia, a girl who is about to receive the vows of the church and her transformation into la Selvatica, the best-known prostitute of "The Green House.” The novel was immediately acclaimed, confirming Vargas Llosa as an important voice of Latin American narrative.

[33] The Green House won the first edition of the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize in 1967, contending with works by veteran Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti and by Gabriel García Márquez.

[48] This short, comic novel offers vignettes of dialogues and documents about the Peruvian armed forces and a corps of prostitutes assigned to visit military outposts in remote jungle areas.

[60] Vargas Llosa's bold exploration of humanity's propensity to idealize violence, and his account of a man-made catastrophe brought on by fanaticism on all sides, earned the novel substantial recognition.

[58] Later the same year, during the Sendero Luminoso uprising, Vargas Llosa was asked by the Peruvian President Fernando Belaúnde Terry to join the Investigatory Commission, a task force to inquire into the massacre of eight journalists at the hands of the villagers of Uchuraccay.

[67] It was almost 20 years before Vargas Llosa wrote another major work: The Feast of the Goat (La fiesta del chivo), a political thriller, was published in 2000 (and in English in 2001).

[68] Critic Sabine Koellmann sees it in the line of his earlier novels such as "Conversación en La Catedral" depicting the effects of authoritarianism, violence and the abuse of power on the individual.

In 2006, Vargas Llosa wrote The Bad Girl (Travesuras de la niña mala), which journalist Kathryn Harrison argues is a rewrite (rather than simply a recycling) of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856).

[74] The official rupture between the writer and the policies of the Cuban government occurred with the so-called 'Padilla Affair', when the Castro regime imprisoned the poet Heberto Padilla for a month in 1971.

[78] With his appointment to the Investigatory Commission on the Uchuraccay massacre [es] in 1983, he experienced what literary critic Jean Franco calls "the most uncomfortable event in [his] political career".

[67] Unfortunately for Vargas Llosa, his involvement with the Investigatory Commission led to immediate negative reactions and defamation from the Peruvian press; many suggested that the massacre was a conspiracy to keep the journalists from reporting the presence of government paramilitary forces in Uchuraccay.

[65] The commission concluded that it was the indigenous villagers who had been responsible for the killings; for Vargas Llosa the incident showed "how vulnerable democracy is in Latin America and how easily it dies under dictatorships of the right and left".

In his Nobel speech he observed: "I carry Peru deep inside me because that is where I was born, grew up, was formed, and lived those experiences of childhood and youth that shaped my personality and forged my calling".

[100] According to IDL-Reporteros, the British Virgin Islands company Melek Investing Inc. was documented to be owned by Vargas Llosa, and was used for book royalty profits and the sale of real estate in London and Madrid.

[101] For example, in his first novel, The Time of the Hero, his own experiences at the Leoncio Prado military school informed his depiction of the corrupt social institution which mocked the moral standards it was supposed to uphold.

[111] Though there is still much debate over the differences between modernist and postmodernist literature, literary scholar M. Keith Booker claims that the difficulty and technical complexity of Vargas Llosa's early works, such as The Green House and Conversation in The Cathedral, are clearly elements of the modern novel.

[111] By contrast, his later novels such as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, and The Storyteller (El hablador) appear to follow a postmodernist mode of writing.

[116] This device is similar to both Virginia Woolf's mixing of different characters' soliloquies and Gustave Flaubert's counterpoint technique in which he blends together conversation with other events, such as speeches.

Vargas Llosa's first literary influences were relatively obscure Peruvian writers such as Martín Adán, Carlos Oquendo de Amat, and César Moro.

He was looking for a style different from the traditional descriptions of land and rural life made famous by Peru's foremost novelist at the time, José María Arguedas.

[125] Other critics such as Sabine Köllmann argue that his belief in the transforming power of literature is one of the great continuities that characterize his fictional and non-fictional work, and link his early statement that 'Literature is Fire' with his Nobel Prize Speech 'In Praise of Reading and Writing'.

[129] In addition to the studies of Arguedas and Flaubert, Vargas Llosa has written literary criticisms of other authors that he has admired, such as Gabriel García Márquez, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

[139] Vargas Llosa has described himself as a supporter of liberalism and said that the individuals who have had most impact on his political thought have included Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek and Isaiah Berlin.

Criticizing the PRI by name, he commented, "I don't believe that there has been in Latin America any case of a system of dictatorship which has so efficiently recruited the intellectual milieu, bribing it with great subtlety."

[150] However, in the second round of the 2021 Peruvian general election, Vargas Llosa expressed support for Keiko, sharing opposition to far-left candidate Pedro Castillo and describing Fujimori as the "lesser of two evils".

His political ideologies appear in the book Política razonable, written with Fernando Savater, Rosa Díez, Álvaro Pombo, Albert Boadella and Carlos Martínez Gorriarán.

[168] Mario Vargas Llosa is considered a major Latin American writer, alongside other authors such as Octavio Paz, Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Isabel Allende.

[179] On 7 October 2010 the Swedish Academy announced that the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat.