Mario Vargas Llosa

Vargas Llosa was sent at fourteen to Lima's Leoncio Prado military academy, an ordeal he transformed into The Time of the Hero, a debut so unflattering that the school burned copies on its parade ground. He studied in Madrid, lived for years in Paris and London, and emerged as the Boom's most disciplined technician.

He ran for Peru's presidency in 1990 on a free-market platform and lost to the unknown Alberto Fujimori, later taking Spanish citizenship. His decades-long friendship with García Márquez ended in 1976 with a punch thrown at a Mexico City theater, over causes both men kept private for the rest of their lives.

He won the Nobel Prize in 2010 and kept publishing into his eighties, including The Feast of the Goat, a novel of Trujillo's Dominican Republic. He died in Lima in 2025.