The writer’s job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have. I think that’s part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only purely artistic. I think a writer has some kind of responsibility at least to participate in the civic debate. I think literature is impoverished, if it becomes cut from the main agenda of people, of society, of life.

These novels have a much lighter farcical and comic tone characteristics of postmodernism. This early piece gained wide public attention and immediate success. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is considered one of the most striking examples of how the language and imagery of popular culture can be used in literature.

Upon announcing the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature the Swedish Academy said it had been given to Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance revolt and defeat". Vargas Llosa rose to fame in the 1960s with novels such as The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros literally The City and the Dogs 1963/1966) The Green House (La casa verde 1965/1968) and the monumental Conversation in the Cathedral (Conversación en la catedral 1969/1975). Like many Latin American writers Vargas Llosa has been politically active throughout his career; over the course of his life he has gradually moved from the political left towards liberalism or neoliberalism a definitively more conservative political position.