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World

How Mario Vargas Llosa was inspired by Thatcher

16 April 2025

12:28 AM

16 April 2025

12:28 AM

Most writers – like the vast majority of actors, artists and other luminaries of our culture – belong to the political left, but the death aged 89 of the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa reminds us that this is not always the case.

Most unusually for a Latin American author, Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, was not only a proud Thatcherite conservative, but himself came within an ace of winning his troubled country’s presidency after temporarily laying down his pen and entering the political arena.

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