Mr. Vargas Llosa, who ran for Peru’s presidency in 1990 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, transformed episodes from his personal life into books that reverberated far beyond the borders of his native country.

Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian-Spanish Nobel Prize-winning author whose work focused on the evils of totalitarianism and who once ran for president, has died at age 89, according to his family.

Mario Vargas Llosa, a prolific Peruvian novelist and essayist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2010, died Sunday in Lima, his family said. He was 89.