Vargas Llosa: Authors are not looked down upon as much as before

The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Peruvian Spanish-American writer Mario Vargas Llosa assured this Tuesday that in Latin America, writers are not looked down upon as much as 30 years ago and that they sometimes win prizes, although sometimes they are kicked out. , referring to the Nicaraguan Sergio Ramirez.

Vargas Llosa (Arequipa, Peru, 1936) was honored this afternoon at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid in an act prepared by the winner of the Sergio Ramírez Cervantes award and in which the first part of the work that unites six decades of journalistic production of the writer was presented, in this case the first volume dedicated to culture and, especially, literary criticism.

In a conversation with writers Carlos Granés (Colombia), editor and prologue writer of the first volume of this work, “Fire of Imagination: Books, Stages, Screens and Museums” (2023), and Sergio Ramírez (Nicaragua), moderated by editors Pilar Reyes, Vargas Llosa recalled his beginnings as a writer and assured that he did not recognize himself in the first articles that make up this book.

This book, of about eight hundred pages, represents the writer’s journey to literary creativity 20th century and well into the 21st, through articles dating from when he was a novice reader in Lima to his 20s.

“I don’t recognize many texts because they were written a long time ago, and others defend positions that are no longer mine, but at the same time it is the story of one writer. It is fundamental that rich, contradictory, complicated past, in which there are very contradictory articles and which, however, when read now, remind of certain episodes from the history of Peru and Latin America that they are inevitable”, pointed out Vargas Llosa.

Vargas Llosa and Borges

The Nobel Prize for Literature explained how he started writing at a very young age, in the newspaper when I was still in school, and how difficult it was to access in Peru at that time literature from other countries, because it was very isolated.

“I remember well the first time I heard of Borges,” with whom he admitted he had disputed relationship: “Then I was a member of the Communist Party, and Borges represented everything that communism hated: he did not believe in reality, nor in social problems, he wrote inspired by classic books about exotic worlds”, so he had to read it at night, already hidden.

He also said that “if someone wanted to be a writer, he had to leave Peru, where no one lives like that”, and he also recalled that his dream was to go to Paris, a city where he bought a copy of the book that changed his life upon arrival : “Madame Bovary”: “Flaubert gave me the passion for the novel and the belief that I am a writer,” he pointed out.

Changes in the position of the author in Latin America

As for the author’s situation, now, he indicated, things have changed in Latin America, where “there is a grim right-wing made up mostly of the military and they give prizes to writers” and where the character “ominous“Like Daniel Ortega, the Nicaraguan president, he rewards” some writers while expelling others, he said, referring to Sergio Ramírez, whose citizenship was revoked.

For his part, Ramírez stated that “a big part of the drama in Latin America is what it is freedom it was good for some, but not for all”, and today there is still “a certain left that does not recognize dictatorships”.

The first volume of Vargas Llosa’s journalistic and essayistic work on literature and art will be followed by the second on Peruproblem areas of the world, the challenges of today’s society and a more personal fifth part about travels and people who influenced the writer, all published by Alfaguara.

Two days are involved in honoring Vargas Llosa and his work Spanish writers and Latin American writers residents of Madrid, such as Rosa Montero, Héctor Abad Facilone, Gioconda Belli or Jorge Eduardo Benavides.