Buenos Aires, 14 April 2025 (dpa/MIA) — Peruvian novelist and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa has died aged 89, his agency confirmed to dpa on Monday.

He "passed away peacefully" in Lima on Sunday surrounded by his family, Vargas Llosa's children said on social media platform X.

"His departure will sadden his relatives, his friends and his readers around the world, but we hope that they will find comfort, as we do, in the fact that he enjoyed a long, adventurous and fruitful life, and leaves behind him a body of work that will outlive him," Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana Vargas Llosa wrote in English.

The Peruvian government ordered a day of national mourning on Monday, according to media reports.

"His intellectual genius and extensive work will be preserved as a lasting legacy for future generations," President Dina Boluarte wrote on X.

Vargas Llosa is considered one of the most important Latin American writers of his generation.

Rising to international fame thanks to novels including "The Time of the Hero," "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" and "The Feast of the Goat," he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010.

His works were often critical of social and political ills in his home country, while also being influenced by his own experiences.

In 1990, the liberal intellectual ran for the presidency in Peru, but was defeated by Alberto Fujimori, who would go on to establish an authoritarian regime before fleeing to Japan in 2000 over corruption allegations.

Vargas Llosa later received Spanish citizenship and lived in Spain for many years.

A staunch liberal, he disseminated his political views primarily in columns and essays. However, his radical positions made him an outsider among left-wing Latin American intellectuals.

Just before his 80th birthday, Vargas Llosa made headlines when leaving his wife of 50 years and mother of their three children Patricia Llosa for socialite Isabel Preysler.

However, he and Preysler, the mother of singer Enrique Iglesias, split after two years.

Vargas Llosa continued writing until the end of his life, publishing his last novel "I Give You My Silence" in 2023.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez paid tribute to Vargas Llosa as a "universal master of the written word."

"I thank him as a reader for an immense body of work, for so many books that are a key to understanding our time," Sánchez wrote on X.

The foundation of the Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez posted a picture of the two writers on X, describing Vargas Llosa as "a master of Spanish-language narrative and a key figure in Latin American literature."

The two authors, who were once friends, later fell out partly because of their opposing political views.