Which Peruvian author wrote 'The Time of the Hero'?

The Peruvian author who wrote “The Time of the Hero” was Mario Vargas Llosa. First published in Spanish as La ciudad y los perros, or “The City and the Dogs,” the novel appeared in 1963 and became a major early work of the Latin American Boom.

The story is set at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, a school Vargas Llosa himself attended as a teenager. It follows cadets living under rigid military discipline, where hierarchy, secrecy, aggression, and ideas about masculinity shape daily life. A stolen examination paper and a death expose the conflict between individual conscience and institutional loyalty.

Vargas Llosa’s narrative is notable for multiple viewpoints, abrupt shifts in time, and a complex, non-linear structure. The academy’s leadership objected to the book’s portrayal of military life; contemporary reports describe copies being burned and the novel being denounced as hostile propaganda.

A common mix-up is the date: the novel won the 1962 Premio Biblioteca Breve as an unpublished manuscript, but its first book publication came in 1963. Vargas Llosa later won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010.