ABSTRACT
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was born in Peru in 1936. He worked as a journalist and broadcaster before publishing his first novel, The Time of the Hero (1963), which describes adolescents striving for survival in the hostile environment of a military school and which showed the strong commitment to social change characteristic of his early work. His best-known works include The Green House (1965), Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), and The War of the End of the World (1981). He won the Cervantes Prize in 1994. His later work reflects a growing conservatism in face of the conflict tearing Peru apart and in 1990 he ran for the presidency of Peru, but he was successfully presented as the conservative candidate and defeated unexpectedly in the second round by Alberto Fujimori.
