Mario Vargas Llosa: The Biography
Joint Seminar between Latin American Centre and Sub-Faculty of Spanish
- Date:
- Time:
- 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
- Event type:
- Lectures and seminars
- Venue:
- LAC Main Seminar Room, 1 Church Walk
- Address:
-
LAC Main Seminar Room
1 Church Walk
Oxford
Oxfordshire
OX2 6LY
United Kingdom
Description
Gerald Martin (London, 1944) studied at Bristol University (BA, 1965), Edinburgh (PhD,1970), UNAM (Leverhulme, 1968-9) and Stanford (Harkness, 1971-2). He led the world’s first undergraduate programme in Latin American Studies in Portsmouth (1971-92) and was Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences there (1984-7). He became Andrew Mellon Chair of Modern Languages in Pittsburgh (1992-2007) and was President of the International Institute of Ibero-American Literature there (2000-04). Between 1971 and 2006 he was the only English-speaking member of the Archivos Collection in Paris (CNRS and Unesco) and later served on the juries of the Casa de las Americas Prize (Havana, 1995), the Colombian National Literature Prize (1995), the Juan Rulfo Prize (Guadalajara, 1997, 2008), and the Formentor Prize (2021, 2026).
Publications include a major critical edition of Miguel Angel Asturias’s Hombres de maiz (Paris and Mexico, 1981), a translation of the same novel in 1975 (now in Penguin Classics, 2024), Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (London, 1989), several chapters in the Cambridge History of Latin America (1984-1995), biographies of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (2008, translated into more than 30 languages), and Mario Vargas Llosa (2026), and, as co-editor, Las cartas del Boom (Barcelona, 2023).
Dominic Moran (Ph.D. Cambridge) is Faculty Lecturer in Spanish and Student of Christ Church, Oxford. His broad area of research is twentieth Spanish American literature, with a particular interest in the avant-garde poetry of the 1920s and 1930s, especially that of Neruda and Vallejo. He is currently working on two series of commentaries, one on a selection of poems from Neruda’s Residencia en la tierra, the other on poems from Vallejo’s Trilce, focusing in particular on specific problems of interpretation and evaluation raised by difficult poetry. He is also interested in prose fiction, especially that of Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa. His publications include: Pablo Neruda (London: Reaktion, 2009); Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, (critical edition), Hispanic Texts (Manchester University Press, 2007); Questions of the Liminal in the Fiction of Julio Cortázar (Oxford: Legenda, 2000)
Publications include a major critical edition of Miguel Angel Asturias’s Hombres de maiz (Paris and Mexico, 1981), a translation of the same novel in 1975 (now in Penguin Classics, 2024), Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (London, 1989), several chapters in the Cambridge History of Latin America (1984-1995), biographies of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (2008, translated into more than 30 languages), and Mario Vargas Llosa (2026), and, as co-editor, Las cartas del Boom (Barcelona, 2023).
Dominic Moran (Ph.D. Cambridge) is Faculty Lecturer in Spanish and Student of Christ Church, Oxford. His broad area of research is twentieth Spanish American literature, with a particular interest in the avant-garde poetry of the 1920s and 1930s, especially that of Neruda and Vallejo. He is currently working on two series of commentaries, one on a selection of poems from Neruda’s Residencia en la tierra, the other on poems from Vallejo’s Trilce, focusing in particular on specific problems of interpretation and evaluation raised by difficult poetry. He is also interested in prose fiction, especially that of Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa. His publications include: Pablo Neruda (London: Reaktion, 2009); Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, (critical edition), Hispanic Texts (Manchester University Press, 2007); Questions of the Liminal in the Fiction of Julio Cortázar (Oxford: Legenda, 2000)