Mario Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian writer, politician, and Nobel Laureate. He is a founding member of the Inter-American Dialogue.

Vargas Llosa is one of the most important Latin American novelists and essayists in history, famous for such works as  The Time of the Hero (1963), The Green House (1965), and Conversation in the Cathedral (1969). He writes prolifically across an array of literary genres, including literary criticism and journalism. Politically active throughout his career, Vargas Llosa ran for president of Peru in 1990. He wrote about this experience in El pez en el agua: memorias (1993).

He became a citizen of Spain in 1993 and was awarded the Cervantes Prize in 1994. In 2011 he was raised into the Spanish nobility by King Juan Carlos I with the hereditary title of Marqués de Vargas Llosa. In 2015, Vargas Llosa made his acting debut at the Teatro Real in Madrid, where he appeared as a duke in Los cuentos de la peste (“Tales of the Plague”), his stage adaptation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. Vargas Llosa was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”

Vargas Llosa joined the Dialogue as a Member in 1984.