Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nobel Prize–winning Peruvian novelist who was one of the key figures of the Latin American Boom and courted controversy with his outspoken political views, has died at 89, the New York Times reports.

Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa, Peru, and raised in Cochabamba, Bolivia, as well as in the Peruvian cities of Piura and Lima. He was educated at the National University of San Marcos in Lima and based his first novel, The Time of the Hero (1963) on his time as a cadet at Peru’s Leoncio Prado Military Academy.

He would go on to publish more than 20 other works of fiction, including The Green House, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, In Praise of the Stepmother, and Harsh Times. He was associated with the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, which saw the ascent of authors including Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez. Vargas Llosa and García Márquez were friends, but their relationship soured after Vargas Llosa punched García Márquez in the face for reasons that have never been explained.

Vargas Llosa was politically active throughout his life, first on the left and later on the right. He ran for president of Peru in 1990 as a center-right libertarian candidate, and earned almost 38% of the vote, losing to the far-right Alberto Fujimori.

Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. The Swedish Academy said it gave him the award "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat."

Readers paid tribute to Vargas Llosa on social media. On the platform X, author Zach Issenberg wrote, “May the memory of Mario Vargas Llosa be a blessing! His novels felt of an entirely different tradition than his peers—because of his work, I found Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, his fathers. His fiction brought the psychology of our 19th century to the burgeoning new millennium.”

And journalist Michael Reid posted, “Adiós Mario Vargas Llosa, a great Peruvian man of letters. He will be remembered above all for half a dozen great novels, especially ‘Conversación en la Catedral.’ Always politically committed, he became a kind of super-ego for Latin America. He will be missed. RIP.”

Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.