Lannan Foundation

Mario Vargas Llosa, born in Peru in 1936, is the author of some of the most significant writing to come out of South America in the past fifty years. His novels include The Green House, about a brothel in a Peruvian town, situated between desert and jungle, that brings together the innocent and the corrupt; The Feast of the Goat, a vivid re-creation of the Dominican Republic during the final days of General Rafael Trujillo's insidious and evil regime; and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, a comedic semi-autobiographical account of an aspiring writer named Marito Varguitas, who falls in love with Julia, the divorced sister-in-law of his Uncle Lucho. He is also a widely read and respected essayist, writing everything from newspaper opinion pieces to critical works on other writers, including The Perpetual Orgy on Flaubert.

Mario Vargas Llosa Bio and Cross Links

Efraín Kristal is a professor of Spanish and comparative literature at the University of California in Los Angeles. He is author of several books on Latin American literature including Temptation of the Word:The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa and Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. He is also editor of the Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel. Kristal chaired UCLA's Department of Comparative Literature from 2002-2005 and is currently the director of the University of California office in Paris. There, his projects include translations into English of philosophical works by Remo Bodei and Yves Michaud and he has been commissioned to co-edit the Cambridge Companion to Mario Vargas Llosa.

Efraín Kristal Bio and Cross Links