WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Mario Vargas Llosa, the internationally acclaimed novelist and a cultural and political figure in Peru, explores the complexities of Peruvian society and the writer's imagination in three dramas.

In The Young Lady from Tacina, history and fiction collide in a 100-year-old woman known as Mamae, as her grand nephew attempts to turn the rich but contradictory stories of her life into a single narrative.

In Kathie and the Hippopotamus, a banker's wife recounts her travel adventures to a writer, but as he embellishes the tales with his own style and tastes, they transform into something altogether new and unexpected.

Finally, in La Chunga, the regulars in a small-town bar trade speculations about what happened between the bar's female owner, a local pimp, and their shared object of desire, who has disappeared.

Vargas Llorca introduces each play with a foreword that helps to place the action in context.

Mario Vargas Llosa is Peru's foremost author and the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1994 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and in 1995 he won the Jerusalem Prize. His many distinguished works include The Storyteller, The Feast of the Goat, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Death in the Andes, In Praise of the Stepmother, The Bad Girl, Conversation in the Cathedral, The Way to Paradise, and The War of the End of the World. He lives in London.