Mario Vargas Llosa

AEI's Council of Academic Advisers has selected the renowned Peruvian novelist, essayist, playwright, and political thinker Mario Vargas Llosa to receive the Institute's Irving Kristol Award for 2005. Vargas Llosa will receive the award and deliver the Irving Kristol Lecture at AEI's annual dinner on March 2, 2005, at the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C.

One of the deepest and most prolific of contemporary novelists and a pioneering force in Latin America's literary revival since the 1960s, Vargas Llosa is also a prominent advocate of democracy, free markets, and individual liberty. In announcing the nomination, AEI president Christopher DeMuth stated, "Mario Vargas Llosa's richly variegated work and career teach that the cause of freedom is universal--it is fundamental to the human condition and essential to the pursuit of justice and peace. As we confront this truth in a course of a strange and violent new political struggle, it is important to recognize that the narrative of freedom has unfolded in many times and places and has stirred the imaginations of our greatest creative artists."

Vargas Llosa was born in 1936 in Arequipa, Peru, raised in Peru and Bolivia, and educated in literature and law at the University of San Marcos in Peru and at the University of Madrid (Ph.D.). Working as a journalist and editor of literary journals in the 1950s, he published his first collection of short stories, Los jefes (The Cubs and Other Stories), in 1959; his first novel, La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero), appeared in 1963 and gained immediate international recognition. Among his best-known works are Conversación en La Catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral, 1969), La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World, 1981), and La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat, 2000). His novels, stories, and studies of Gustave Flaubert and Gabriel García Márquez have been translated into many languages and have spawned a substantial body of literary criticism.

Agitation against a government seizure of Peru's private banks in 1987 drew Vargas Llosa into active politics for several years. In 1990, he was the candidate of the Frente Democrático (Democratic Front) for the president of Peru; he ran on a platform of free-market reform and narrowly lost to Alberto Fujimori. His memoir El pez en el agua (A Fish in the Water, 1993) relates his brief political career.

A past president of International PEN, an association of prominent literary writers and editors dedicated to defending freedom of expression, Vargas Llosa has held visiting professorships at Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown, and other American and European universities, and he is a member of the Scholars' Council of the U.S. Library of Congress. He was the first twentieth-century Latin American to be elected to the Spanish Royal Academy (1994); among his numerous other honors are the Cervantes Prize (1994), the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (1996), and the (U.S.) National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism (1997). Vargas Llosa writes a newspaper column titled "Piedra de Toque" for El País (Madrid) that is syndicated throughout Latin America. He and his wife, Patricia, have three grown children and currently reside in London, Madrid, and Lima.

Vargas Llosa follows noted political essayist Charles Krauthammer as a recipient of the Irving Kristol Award, AEI's highest honor, which recognizes individuals who have made extraordinary intellectual or practical contributions to improved government policy or social welfare. The award was established in 2002 in honor of AEI senior fellow Irving Kristol, replacing the Institute's Francis Boyer Award, which had been awarded annually over the previous twenty-five years.