(Madrid) The Spanish-Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, 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, have announced his children on Monday.
“Given the media interest in our father’s condition, we are announcing that he has been hospitalized since Saturday after being diagnosed with COVID-19,” his children, Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana said. , 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.”
The press release 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,” the newspaper added, citing family sources.
The 87-year-old writer’s first hospitalization for COVID-19, in April 2022, was in the Spanish capital. His stay in the hospital then lasted a few days.
Born 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 description of social realities, Mario Vargas Llosa, the author of masterpieces such as The City and the Dogs, Conversation in the Cathedral and The Party with the Goat, was however 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.
