On March 28, 2008, Peruvian-Spanish writer Mario Vargas Llosa (1936) celebrated his seventy-two birthday. Few days later, on April 10, was at Pennsylvania State university to receive IAH Medal for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Humanities. Established in 2006, prior recipients of this prestigious award were Daniel Libeskind (2007) and Salman Rushdie (2006). title of his acceptance speech was The Road to Fiction. Based on title of his talk, I asked my undergraduate students to anticipate what Vargas Llosa's public lecture would be about. Most of them thought would be speaking about himself, about his experiences as an aspiring writer and about obstacles had to overcome to become a consecrated author, considering therefore fiction as end of road took many years before. But Vargas Llosa's words were about fiction not as a destination but as a starting point to unknown, which is propelling force of his writing, as author himself explained in one of his lectures at Syracuse University in 1991: And that is what I enjoy, that is what I like when I write a book, to discover that something has been pushing me in a direction that I could not expect when I started (Discovering a Method 45). words that follow represent a modest and warm homage to a writer who has been--and continues to be--an inexhaustible source of inspiration for students, readers, writers and critics alike. As a telling anecdote, Spanish actor Fernando Guillen Cuervo confessed in a recent interview on Spanish National Radio that had modeled role of diabolic colonel played in last James Bond's movie (Quantum of Solace) upon Vargas Llosa's depiction of ruthless Dominican dictator Leonidas Trujillo in Feast of Goat (2000). Vargas Llosa's words and works have been filmed, staged, parodied, praised, discussed and referred to in fictions written by other contemporary Latino American writers. Creator in his own books of unforgettable characters, author himself shares with Don Quixote rare privilege of knowing that he himself has also become a character in a fictional world. In Circle of Murderous Writers (2006), Peruvian novelist Diego Trelles Paz shapes Vargas Llosa into a character who shares novelistic space with a group of young aspiring writers eager to kill their artistic forefathers in order to find their own creative voices. Since his first appearance on literary stage with publication of Cubs and Other Stories (1959), Vargas Llosa has not ceased to be a passionate and committed player in international cultural, political, artistic and intellectual debates. In a 2000 interview with Cesar Ferreira for Peruvian newspaper El Comercio, Vargas Llosa spoke of Bill Gates' leaving a meeting where this modern king of technological era had just promised members of Spanish Royal Academy of Science, Arts and Letters, that wouldn't remove contested letter n from his computer keyboards. Gates confessed that wanted to accomplish one more grand design before died: make all books obsolete. Notwithstanding playful provocation of Gates' death sentence to printing page, Vargas Llosa doubted success of such an enterprise arguing that the act of reading a piece of literature demands a sort of intimacy that disappears when one sits down in front of a computer screen. It is this sense of intimacy that--I firmly believe--we all treasure when we read books: a sense of forbidden, of impossible made possible, of breaking physical, social and moral boundaries that reality imposes on each of us to wander freely in a fictional world of our creation and our choosing. For Vargas Llosa this imaginative freedom, which empowers every individual to be creator of his or her own world, is vital force of his writings. To write means to imagine, and to imagine means to reinvent one's life thanks to magical power of words. …