"A few days ago, due to complications caused by the coronavirus, he was admitted to a clinic in Madrid," the writer's son wrote on Twitter.

"Thanks to the treatment, his condition is changing favorably," he added.

"We thank him and his family for all the affection shown to us and we ask the press to please respect his privacy", concluded this message signed by the three children of the writer, Alvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana.

The Peruvian author, naturalized Spanish in 1993, had just presented his latest work in early April, "The Calm Gaze (by Pérez Galdos)", an essay on the Spanish writer Benito Pérez Galdos (1843-1920).

He was to attend next week the presentation of a biography of Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Quixote, by Santiago Muñoz Machado, an event which has been postponed.

Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, Vargas Llosa is the last representative of the generation of Latin American writers known as the "Boom" to which also belonged the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Argentinian Julio Cortazar or the Mexican Carlos Fuentes.

"Dreamers by nature"

"We Latin Americans are dreamers by nature and find it difficult to differentiate the real world from fiction. That's why we have such good musicians, poets, painters and writers, and so many horrible, mediocre leaders," he said in 2010, shortly before receiving the Nobel.

Admired for his description of social realities but criticized by South American intellectual circles for his conservative positions, translated into thirty languages, Vargas Llosa, Francophile, was the first foreign writer to enter during his lifetime in the prestigious French collection of the Pléiade in 2016, the year of his 80th birthday.

Born in Arequipa (southern Peru) on March 28, 1936 into a middle-class family, Vargas Llosa was raised by his mother and maternal grandparents in Bolivia and then Peru.

After studying at the Military Academy in Lima, he obtained a degree in literature and took his first steps in journalism.

He then moved to Paris in the early 1960s, "decisive" years, he wrote in the foreword to his works published in the Pléiade.

This is where the author of "The Perpetual Orgy" - an essay on the profession of writer through "Madame Bovary" - wrote his first novels.

He says that "it was thanks to Flaubert" that he learned the working method that suited him and to become "the writer he wanted to be".

It was also in Paris - where Vargas Llosa was a translator, Spanish teacher or journalist at Agence France Presse - that he married his aunt by marriage Julia Urquidi, ten years his senior, who would later inspire the author "Aunt Julia and the Scribouillard".

A few years later, he separated from Julia Urquidi and married his first cousin and niece of his ex-wife, Patricia Llosa, with whom he had three children and remained 50 years.

His literary career took off in 1959 with his first collection of short stories, "Les caïds".

Success comes with "The City and the Dogs" (1963) then "The Green House" (1966) and is consolidated with "Conversation at the Cathedral" (1969).

Follow "Pantaleón and the visitors", "The war of the end of the world" or "The fish in the water", memoirs retracing in particular his electoral campaign for the Peruvian presidential election of 1990. The author then proclaims his intention to continue to write until his last days.

© 2022 AFP