Obituary: Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010

Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian novelist who combined gritty realism with playful erotica and depictions of the struggle for individual liberty in Latin America, while also writing essays that made him one of the most influential political commentators in the Spanish-speaking world, died on April 13 in Lima. He was 89.

- Simon Romero

LIMA - Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian novelist who combined gritty realism with playful erotica and depictions of the struggle for individual liberty in Latin America, while also writing essays that made him one of the most influential political commentators in the Spanish-speaking world, died on April 13 in Lima. He was 89.

His death was announced in a social media statement from his children, sons Alvaro and Gonzalo, and daughter Morgana.

Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, gained renown as a young writer with slangy, blistering visions of the corruption, moral compromises and cruelty festering in Peru. He joined a cohort of writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia and Julio Cortazar of Argentina, who became famous in the 1960s as members of Latin America's literary "boom generation".

Vargas Llosa's distaste for the norms of polite society in Peru gave him abundant inspiration. After he was enrolled at age 14 in the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, he turned that experience into his first novel, The Time Of The Hero (1963), a critical account of military life.

The book was denounced by several generals, including one who claimed it was financed by Ecuador to undermine Peru's military — all of which helped make it an immediate success.

Vargas Llosa was never fully enamoured, however, of his contemporaries' magical realism. And he was disillusioned with late leader Fidel Castro's persecution of dissidents in Cuba, breaking from the leftist ideology that held sway for decades over many writers in Latin America.