(Santo Domingo) The Peruvian-Spanish Nobel Prize for Literature Mario Vargas Llosa received Wednesday the nationality of the Dominican Republic, a country where he intends to make long stays and which notably inspired his novel La fête au bouc.
“I intend to come and work in the Dominican Republic,” Vargas Llosa, 87, said at the Presidential Palace in Santo Domingo alongside President Luis Abinader.
He said he hoped to “spend a period of exhilaration and true accomplishment” in the Dominican Republic.
“I asked him, because of his decision to spend a lot of time in the country, to accept Dominican citizenship and he accepted it,” Abinader told reporters.
La fête au bouc, a novel published in 2000, recounts life in the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of the aging Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (1930-1961).
The author of The City and the Dogs or Tours and Detours of the Naughty Girl received the Pedro Henriquez Ureña International Prize for Literature in 2016, awarded by the Dominican government.
This acknowledgment had sparked protests from conservative groups who called him an “enemy” of the country for his criticism of migration policies towards citizens of Haiti with whom the Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola. .
In a November 3, 2013 article in the Spanish daily El Pais, titled “The outcasts of the Caribbean”, Vargas Llosa called a “legal aberration” a 2013 Dominican court ruling denying nationality to descendants of immigrants who entered without papers. born between 1929 and 2013.
Vargas Llosa became in February the first non-French language author to enter the French Academy, founded in 1635.
