Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa Passed Away at Age 89 — His Career Spanned Over 50 Years

In the early 1960s, a movement known as the Boom ushered in an explosion of Latin American writers, including, but not limited to, José Donoso, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes. Their works were some of the first Latin American novels to be published in Europe and were centered on the political climate of that time, particularly in Cuba.

The last living Boom writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, passed away at age 89 on April 13, 2025. According to The New York Times, Mario had a menacing father who sent him to military school in the hopes of "curing" him of his love of writing. This backfired when it led to his first novel, The Time of the Hero. As a hero in his own right and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mario was instrumental in creating a movement that changed the world. Here's what we know about his cause of death.

In a post to X, Mario's children shared that their father passed away "peacefully in Lima," surrounded by his family. They acknowledged the fact that his death will undoubtedly sadden those who knew him as well as people who enjoyed his work. It is the hope of his family that they will "find comfort" as they do in the "fact that he enjoyed a long, adventurous, and fruitful life, and leaves behind him a body of work that will outlive him. A cause of death was not revealed.

Because of the nature of Mario's work, it made sense that he would eventually make his way to politics. In 1990, he ran for president of Peru, and though he lost by a landslide, it was something no writer had ever attempted. He was a master at weaving personal stories into historical facts, thus allowing him to comment on the world around him in an engaging fashion. There was simply no one else like him.

Beneath the post from Mario's family, condolences poured in. Nicaraguan social activist Bianca Jagger, Mick Jagger's first wife, said Mario was a "towering figure of Latin American literature and one of the most powerful political voices." John Norberg, author of The Capitalist Manifesto, put it best when he wrote, "Through his work and the influence he had on so many of us, he remains immortal."