Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian novelist who combined gritty realism with playful erotica and depictions of the struggle for individual liberty in Latin America, while also writing essays that made him one of the most influential political commentators in the Spanish-speaking world, died Sunday in Lima. He was 89.

His death was announced in a social media statement by his children.

Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2010, gained renown as a young writer with slangy, blistering visions of the corruption, moral compromises and cruelty festering in Peru. He joined a cohort of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia and Julio Cortázar of Argentina, who became famous in the 1960s as members of Latin America’s literary “boom generation.”

His distaste for the norms of polite society in Peru gave him abundant inspiration. After he was enrolled at the age of 14 in the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, Vargas Llosa turned that experience into his first novel, “The Time of the Hero,” a critical account of military life published in 1963.

The book was denounced by several generals, including one who claimed it had been financed by Ecuador to undermine Peru’s military — all of which helped make it an immediate success.

Vargas Llosa was never fully enamored, however, by his contemporaries’ magical realism. And he was disillusioned with Fidel Castro’s persecution of dissidents in Cuba, breaking from the leftist ideology that held sway for decades over many writers in Latin America.

He charted his own path as a conservative, often divisive political thinker and as a novelist who transformed episodes from his personal life into books that reverberated far beyond the borders of his native country.

His dabbling in politics ultimately led to a run for the presidency in 1990. That race allowed him to champion the free-market causes he espoused, including the privatization of state enterprises and reducing inflation through government spending cuts and layoffs of the bloated civil service.

He led polls for much of the race but was roundly defeated by Alberto Fujimori, then a little-known agronomist of Japanese descent who later adopted many of Vargas Llosa’s policies.

Vargas Llosa had a passion for fiction, but he started out in journalism. As a teenager, he was a night reporter for La Crónica, a Lima daily, chronicling an underworld of dive bars, crime and prostitution. Elements of that experience fed into his 1969 novel, “Conversation in the Cathedral,” a depiction of Peru’s malaise under Gen. Manuel Odría’s military dictatorship during the 1950s, a book that is often considered his masterwork.

And although he often wrote articles for newspapers in Europe and the United States, Vargas Llosa experienced a journalistic rebirth in the 1990s as a columnist for the newspaper El País in Spain, where he had been granted citizenship.

His fortnightly column, “Piedra de toque,” or “Touchstone,” was syndicated in Spanish-language newspapers throughout Latin America and the United States. It gave him a platform for topics such as the reemergence of populism in the Andes, the art of Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin, and his vociferous support for the state of Israel, a frequent theme in his political writing.