The health of Mario Vargas Llosa worries. The Spanish-Peruvian writer, 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature and member of the French Academy, was hospitalized on Saturday due to complications related to Covid-19, for the second time in 15 months, his children announced on Monday.
“Given the media interest in the state of health of our father, we announce that he has been hospitalized since Saturday after being diagnosed with Covid-19,” said his children, Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana, in a press release. “He is being cared for by excellent professionals and accompanied by his family,” they added, asking “the media to respect his privacy.”
His condition is “stable” according to the newspaper El País
The statement does not specify in which hospital or in which city is the Peruvian author, naturalized Spanish in 1993, and who usually resides in Madrid. According to the daily El País, in which he publishes his weekly articles, Vargas Llosa is in a Madrid hospital. His condition is “stable”, adds the newspaper, citing family sources.
The 87-year-old writer’s first hospitalization for Covid-19, in April 2022, took place in the Spanish capital. His stay in the hospital then lasted a few days.
An author in the Pléiade
Born on March 28, 1936 into a middle-class Peruvian family, Vargas Llosa was one of the great protagonists of the Latin American literary boom in the 1960s and 1970s, along with Colombian Gabriel García Márquez and Argentinian Julio Cortazar. Admired for his depiction of social realities, Mario Vargas Llosa, author of masterpieces such as The city and the dogs, Conversation in the Cathedral And The goat partyon the other hand, is criticized by South American intellectual circles for his conservative positions.
Translated into thirty languages, this Francophile author, who lived for several years in Paris in his youth, was the first foreign writer to enter the prestigious collection of the Pléiade during his lifetime in 2016. He was elected to the French Academy in 2021.