4 Ways To Impress A Peruvian In A Cultural Conversation

With the recent award of a Nobel Prize to Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian writer, the arts and culture of Peru are now getting more attention than ever. If you are going for a vacation in Peru, there's never been a better time to impress the locals with your knowledge of Peru’s modern culture, so here are 4 of Peru’s more well-known photographers, writers and painters to get the conversation flowing.

The celebrity portrait photographer
A famous Peruvian fashion photographer is Mario Testino, who was born in 1954. Testino has done a great variety of photography including fashion narratives for Vogue, Gucci and Vanity Fair as well as celebrity shots of such people as Diana Princess of Wales along with her sons; actresses including Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan, Cameron Diaz and Gwyneth Platrow; models such as Elizabeth Hurley and Kate Moss and performers including Madonna, Lady Gaga and Janet Jackson. Since 1982, Testino has been living in London and frequently photographs the British Royal Family in addition to his work being exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London as well as in many galleries and museums around the world. Most recently his work is being shown in London at the Phillips de Pury & Co auction house.

The indigenous photographer
Considered the only major indigenous Latin America photographer of his time, Martín Chambi Jiménez lived from 1891 until 1973. His photographs were prolific and covered the towns and countryside of the Peruvian Andes revealing their social complexity and giving his photographs profound historic and ethnic documentary value. He photographed almost anything from weddings and fiestas to the poverty of the poor along with the public events shared by both. He was a major portrait photographer in Cusco as well as a photographer of many Peruvian landscapes which he sold primarily as postcards, a format he pioneered in Peru. The New York Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of his work in 1979 and it later traveled to other locations around the world and inspired more international exhibitions of his work.

The Nobel Prize winning author
Born in 1936, Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, recent winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, is a Peruvian writer, journalist, essayist and politician. He is one of the leading authors of his generation and one of Latin America’s most significant novelists and essayists. He gained international recognition as a writer in the 1960s with his novels such as “The Time of the Hero”, “The Green House” and “Conversation in the Cathedral”. He not only writes novels but across other literary genres such as journalism and literary criticism. Themes for his novels include comedies, murder mysteries, political thriller and historical novels. Several of his novels have also been made into feature films.

The painter famous for "pin-up" ladies
Famous for his paintings of pin-up girls is Alberto Vargas who lived from 1896 until 1982. He was born in Arequipa, Peru but moved to the United States in 1916, after studying art in Europe before the First World War. Early in his career he worked as an artist for the Ziegfeld Follies as well as many Hollywood studios. His fame as an artist of pin-up girls came during the Second World War when his pictures for Esquire magazine became known as the “Varga Girls”. Many World War II aircraft adapted their nose art from those Esquire pin-ups. The “Varga Girls” reappeared in Playboy magazine in the 1960s, leading to a flourishing career with major exhibitions all over the world. Vargas painted mostly with watercolor and airbrush and is considered as one of the finest artists in his genre.

You're ready! Get out there and let your Peruvian hosts know about your appreciation for their culture. Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel Prize has created a huge amount of national pride, and your knowledge is bound to make you a few foreign friends.

Author: Jon Clarke - Escaped to Peru / Escaped to Latin America

Mario Vargas Llosa - Peru's Nobel Prize Winner

Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa has long been regarded as one of the most acclaimed writers, playwrights, essayists and literary critics in Latin America. Recently this reputation was confirmed by the prestigious 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature. This makes him one of two Latin Americans to have won the prize, alongside Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Born in Arequipa, Peru, Vargas Llosa stays true to his roots. Most of his novels take place in Peru and follow the traditional Peruvian fiction regarding social protest that exposes political corruption, violence and racial prejudices. Despite dealing with such passionate and personal topics, he is known for maintaining a lack of preaching or having to reconcile ideological propaganda with artistic aims.

After being born in Arequipa, Peru in 1936, Vargas Llosa moved to Bolivia after his parents separated, with his mother and maternal grandparents. The family returned to live in northern Peru in 1946 and then moved to Lima, Peru. He first attended military school and then studied literature and law in Lima, and afterwards Spain. During this time, he wrote several books on literary criticism as well as fiction and started to become a famous writer whose ambitious goal was to rejuvenate the Latin American novel.

During the 1960s, the country of Peru suffered from problems in the publishing industry and many Peruvian writers suffered as well. Vargas Llosa moved to France and was a Spanish teacher, journalist and broadcaster in the early 1960s. During the late 1960s, he served as an adjunct professor at many European and American universities.

It was in 1962, however, that Vargas Llosa primarily became known as a novelist with the book, “The Time of the Hero”, which takes place at one of the military academies where he had been a student. It won immediate international recognition although it was considered controversial in his own country where 1000 copies were publicly burned by Peruvian military officials.

Since then, he has written over thirty novels, plays and essays including “Conversation in the Cathedral” and the “The Green House”. He was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Hispanic world’s most distinguished literary honor in 1995.

In addition to novels, Vargas Llosa has published a great deal of criticism and literary and political journalism. He has been a writer with an international following and has written for The New York Times, Le Monde, The Times Literary Supplement, El País, and other well-known newspapers. The book, “Diary of Iraq”, published in 2003, is a collection of his articles for El País magazine about the war in Iraq. In 2005 he travelled to Israel and Palestine with his daughter to record his impressions in the book “Israel/Palestine: Peace or War”. The Jewish community in South America had mixed reactions.

Entering the political arena, he ran to become president of Peru in 1990 but lost to Alberto Fujimori. In 1994, he was the first Latin American writer to be elected to the Spanish Academy and he took his seat there in 1996.

If you are planning a vacation to Peru or would like to get to know the country better, be sure to check out some of Mario Vargas Llosa's varied works for a unique and intimate view of the Peruvian psychology. It might help explain some of the strange things you encounter when travelling!

Author: Jon Clarke- Escaped to Peru / Escaped to Latin America