MIAMI, United States. — The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa entered the French Academy this Thursday, thus becoming the first author without a work in French to have been admitted to that prestigious institution.
Vargas Llosa’s entry into the Academy occurred in a solemn and traditional ceremony which began at three in the afternoon (local time) at the Amphitheater of the French Institute, in Paris.
In his speech before those present, the 86-year-old author thanked France for helping him feel like “a Peruvian and Latin American writer.”
“Thanks to France I discovered the other side of Latin America, the problems common to all its countries, the horrible legacy of military coups and underdevelopment, the guerrilla and shared dreams of liberation,” said the writer in his speech.
Vargas Llosa also took advantage of his speech to express his condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“There will always remain – how can we doubt it? – that caricature that totalitarian countries sell us like novels, but that only exist after having gone through the censorship that mutilates them, to sustain the phantasmagoric institutions of antics similar to democracy, of which He gives us the example of Vladimir Putin’s Russia”.
Present at the ceremony were the King Emeritus of Spain, Juan Carlos I, who attended in the company of his daughter, Infanta Cristina.
Throughout his extensive and successful career, Vargas Llosa has won numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature (2010), the Cervantes Prize (1994), the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature (1986), the National Prize for Literature of Peru (1971), the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize (1988), the Planeta Novel Prize (1994), the Critics’ Prize in Spain (1994), among others.
