Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel literature laureate and giant of Latin American letters, died on Sunday, April 13.

He was 89.

“It is with deep sorrow that we announce that our father, Mario Vargas Llosa, passed away peacefully in Lima today, surrounded by his family,” read a letter, which stated there will be a cremation and no public ceremony, signed by his children Alvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana on X (formerly Twitter).

Vargas Llosa was the author of such celebrated novels as The Time of the Hero (La Ciudad y los Perros) and Feast of the Goat.

A prolific novelist and essayist and winner of myriad prizes, he was awarded the Nobel in 2010 after being considered a contender for many years.

He started writing early, and at 15 was a part-time crime reporter for La Cronica newspaper.

His first collection, The Cubs and Other Stories, was published in 1959. But he burst onto the literary stage in 1963 with his groundbreaking debut novel The Time of the Hero, a book that drew on his experiences at a Peruvian military academy but angered the country’s military, leading to 1,000 copies being burned by military authorities, many of whom branded Vargas Llosa a communist.

But that did not deter the author, who quickly became established Llosa as one of the leaders of the new wave of Latin American writers of the 1960s and 1970s, alongside Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes.

Eventually, Vargas Llosa came to be a fierce defender of personal and economic liberties, gradually edging away from his communism-linked past, and regularly attacked Latin American leftist leaders he viewed as dictators.

Although an early supporter of the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro, he later grew disillusioned and denounced Castro’s Cuba.

By 1980, he said he no longer believed in socialism as a solution for developing nations.

In a famous incident in Mexico City in 1976, Vargas Llosa punched fellow Nobel Prize winner and ex-friend Garcia Marquez, whom he later ridiculed as “Castro’s courtesan”. It was never clear whether the fight was over politics or a personal dispute, as neither writer ever wanted to discuss it publicly.

In 1965, he married his first cousin, Patricia Llosa, 10 years his junior, and together they had three children.

They divorced 50 years later, and he started a relationship with Spanish society figure Isabel Preysler, former wife of singer Julio Iglesias and mother of singer Enrique Iglesias. They separated in 2022.

He is survived by his children.