In 1990, Mario Vargas Llosa temporarily exchanged the novel for the machinery of electoral politics, standing for the presidency of Peru during a period of hyperinflation, political violence and institutional collapse.

This issue of Granta assembles a close-range account of that campaign: Vargas Llosa’s own reflections sit beside reports from his son Álvaro, his political consultant Mark Malloch Brown and others who watched a celebrated novelist discover that public argument and political power obey entirely different grammars.

Vargas Llosa writes with the narrative command of a novelist but also the wounded certainty of a candidate who believed coherent liberal principles could survive contact with patronage, spectacle, fear and the compromises demanded by coalition-building. His eventual defeat by Alberto Fujimori hangs over the issue, making it a study in how democratic politics selects not merely between ideas but between stories, personalities and competing versions of reality.

Alongside the political dossier are contributions from writers including Martin Amis, Graham Swift, George Steiner and David Grossman. The issue therefore works both as a historical record of a consequential Peruvian election and as a distinctly Granta-like collision of reportage, memoir, photography and literary writing. For readers interested in the vanity of public intellectuals, the theatre of elections, Latin American politics or what happens when a writer attempts to govern the world he has previously only described. 

Granta 36, Summer 1991. Penguin paperback. Light rubbing, handling marks and edge wear; mild corner creasing. Internally clean and firmly bound.