SOURCE: Vargas Llosa, Mario, Jorge Villanueva Chang, and Jimena Pinilla Cisneros. “An Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa.” World Literature Today 76, no. 1 (winter 2002): 65-9.

In the following interview—originally conducted in June 2000 and published in the June 24, 2000, edition of El Comercio—Vargas Llosa discusses the implications of the computerization of literature, the most successful novels of the past century, and the Boom period in Latin American literature.

Since the early 1960s, Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936) has been regarded as one of Latin America's leading writers, a novelist whose books can be read as a modern-day saga of Peruvian and Latin American society. Among his more notable works are La casa verde (1965; Eng. The Green House), Conversación en la Catedral (1969; Eng. Conversation in the Cathedral), La tía Julia y el escribidor (1979; Eng. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter), Historia de Mayta (1984; Eng. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta...