(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 the state of health of our father, we announce that he has been hospitalized since Saturday after being diagnosed” positive “for COVID-19”, said his children, Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana, in a statement.
“He is being cared for by excellent professionals and accompanied by his family,” they added, asking “the media to respect his privacy.”
The statement does not specify in which hospital or in which city is hospitalized the Peruvian author, naturalized Spanish in 1993, and who usually resides in Madrid.
His first hospitalization for COVID-19, in April 2022, was in the Spanish capital.
Born March 28, 1936 in Arequipa, southern Peru, into a middle-class family, Vargas Llosa was one of the great protagonists of the Latin American literary boom in the 1960s and 1970s, along with the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez and Argentinian Julio Cortázar.
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.