Previously a little-known university rector, he won a presidential election in 1990, defeating Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru's best-known novelist.

ECONOMIST: A victory for the rule of law

Coetzee, Joan Didion, Tadeusz Konwicki, Aleksandar Hemon, Mario Vargas Llosa, Lorrie Moore, Doris Lessing, Patrick Chamoiseau, to name a few.

NEWYORKER: Daniel Alarc��n

In 1990, Alberto Fujimori, then an obscure university professor, defeated Mario Vargas Llosa, a novelist representing the traditional parties of the centre-right.

ECONOMIST: Ollanta Humala feeds on discontent

They harassed and detained Mario Vargas Llosa for hours in the airport.

FORBES: 5 Ways To Invest In Venezuelan Freedom

Its major international ally, a Nobel Laureate in literature, and Atlas Templeton Fellow, Mario Vargas Llosa, has championed this organization across the Americas.

FORBES: Move up http://i.forbesimg.com t Move down

More recently, Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, delivered a highly critical and apparently quite effective speech that ridiculed Chavez at a conference in Caracas.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Zeroing in on Peru

By the same token world intellectuals such as Mario Vargas Llosa and European philosophers such as Bernard Henri Levy and Andre Glucksmann are denouncing Chavez's abuses.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Civil disobedience, Chavez, and democracy

Mario Vargas Llosa, the winner of a Nobel prize for literature and a passionate liberal, has given an energetic endorsement to a man whose politics he recently abhorred.

ECONOMIST: Peru's presidential election

In 1990 Mario Vargas Llosa, one of Latin America's foremost novelists, enraged by a government attempt to nationalise his country's banks, cast aside his pen and threw himself into politics.

ECONOMIST: Jaime Bayly��s breath of fresh air

The trend that began with Mr Fujimori's defeat in 1990 of a coalition of such parties led by Peru's most famous novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, appears to have been consummated.

ECONOMIST: Peru