Peruvian Novelist Vargas Llosa to Speak Wednesday on Campus

Peruvian novelist, journalist, playwright, and former presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa will visit UCSB on Wednesday and Thursday, Feb. 20-21, as a College of Creative Studies Distinguished Visiting Fellow.

He will make his only public appearance with a lecture (and book signing) on Wednesday at 8 p.m. in Campbell Hall titled "History, the Future, and the Writer's Obligation." General tickets are priced at $6; information is available at x3535.

Books by the author will be available for purchase and signing at the event, courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore.

While on campus, Vargas Llosa, the author of more than a dozen novels, will meet with students of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, one of the sponsors of his visit. The CCS also plans to host a reception for the writer, whom the Houston Chronicle has hailed as "already regarded along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes as one of Latin America's three greatest living novelists."

In 1990, Vargas Llosa, who had long incorporated political and social criticism in his writing, ran against little-known Alberto Fujimori for the Peruvian presidency. After a bitter and violent campaign, he lost to a man who seized authoritarian powers a few years later.

Vargas Llosa went into self-imposed exile in London and Fujimori ran Peru--until the country rebelled against his administration's repression and corruption, forcing him to flee to Japan in 2000.

The writer crafted a 1994 memoir, "A Fish in the Water," that evoked his early childhood in Peru and Bolivia but emphasized the 1990 presidential campaign. "Feast of the Goat," published in 2000, is his most recently translated book, but in 2001 he published "El Paraiso en la Otra Esquina" (Paradise in the Other Corner).