Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who enchanted readers with his intellectual rigor and lyrical prose for five decades and came close to being president of his country, has died aged 89.

He passed away in the country's capital Lima surrounded by his family and "at peace," his son Alvaro Vargas Llosa, a well-known political commentator, said.

A leading light in the 20th century Latin American literature boom, Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2010 for works like "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter," "Death in the Andes," and "The War of the End of the World."

But early on he abandoned the socialist ideas that were embraced by many of his peers, and his dabbling in politics and conservative views annoyed much of Latin America's leftist intellectual class.

In 1990, he ran for president of Peru, saying he wanted to save his country from economic chaos and a Marxist insurgency.

He lost in the run-off to Alberto Fujimori, a then-unknown agronomist and university professor who defeated the insurgents but was later jailed for human rights crimes and corruption.

Frustrated by his loss, the writer moved to Spain but remained influential in Latin America, where he harshly criticized a new wave of strident leftist leaders led by then-Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

In his dozens of novels, plays and essays, Vargas Llosa told stories from various viewpoints and experimented with form -moving back and forth in time and switching narrators.

His work crossed genres and established him as a foundational figure in a generation of writers that led a resurgence in Latin American literature in the 1960s.

His books often examined the unnerving relationships between leaders and their subjects. "The Feast of the Goat" (2000) details the brutal regime of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo, while "The War of the End of the World" (1981) tells the true story of a fanatical preacher whose flock dies in a deadly war with Brazil's army in the 1890s.

Born to middle-class parents in Arequipa, Peru, on March 28, 1936, Vargas Llosa lived in Bolivia and the Peruvian capital Lima. He later made a home in Madrid, but retained influence in Peru, where he wrote for newspapers about current events.

Vargas Llosa frequently drew from personal experience and his family, at times inserting characters based on his own life into his tales.

In the 1970s, Vargas Llosa, a one-time supporter of the Cuban revolution, denounced Fidel Castro, maddening many of his leftist literary colleagues like Colombian writer and fellow Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

In 1976, the two had a famous argument, throwing punches outside a theater in Mexico City. A friend of Garcia Marquez said Vargas Llosa was upset that the Colombian had consoled his wife during an estrangement but Vargas Llosa refused to discuss it. (Reuters)