It's not often that Latin American writers provide fuel for Irish tabloids but Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru's leading novelist, gave The Sunday World a tasty morsel last weekend. "Lesbian Kiss Sparks Fury From Fiery Rev" screamed the headline, denouncing La Chunga, the writer's sexually-explicit play, currently showing at Belfast's Lyric Theatre.

The play explores the darker side of male-female relationships, "blending sexual fantasy, secret longings and unfulfilled dreams," and is tagged with a health warning about nudity and strong language.

The story line proved too much for Free Presbyterian Minister David McIlween, who said the "degenerate" play "would hinder family participation in theatre."

"I feel absolutely at home" was the author's jocular response, warming up to an appreciative audience at the Belfast Festival. The turnout was high despite the tropical monsoon outside Queen's University on Monday.

He wasn't kidding. When Vargas Llosa ran as a candidate for the presidency of Peru in 1990, Lima's state-owned television broadcast extracts from his erotic novel In Praise of the Stepmother at peak hours. "Mothers, take your children away from the television," the narrator warned. "You are about to hear the most obscene words in the Spanish language . . . This man who would pretend to be the president of Peru," the voice continued, "will bring pornography to the house of Pizarro!"

Vargas Llosa has also defied bombs and censorship throughout a remarkable career which has produced 16 novels, five plays, literary criticism, personal memoirs, a failed presidential bid and annual rumours of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

"Literature helps people to breathe," he told his Belfast audience, acknowledging that many of his themes derive from problems deeply embedded in his psyche.

Born in Arequipa, in 1934, Vargas Llosa spent his childhood in Bolivia with his mother and grandparents, believing his father was dead. This period was to be the happiest of his life, as the child basked in the indulgent love of his extended family, while he imagined his father as an impossibly heroic figure.

The true story proved painful, as his father had simply abandoned his pregnant wife five months after their marriage, announcing that he was taking up a job abroad.

When Mario was 10 years old his father, Ernesto Vargas, suddenly reappeared and set up house again with his former wife, moving back to Lima. Mario was forbidden any contact with his maternal cousins, due to his father's feelings of hatred and personal inferiority.

The young boy was traumatised by the sudden change in his life and wrote poems as "a symbolic way of resisting the authority of this strange man, my father."

The world of books opened up "an environment where I could live without fear" said Vargas Llosa, whose 90-minute public interview veered toward becoming a family therapy session.

Vargas Llosa is at ease in public, his relaxed, youthful air belying his 64 years, his ready laughter inviting intimacy. The public forum was chaired by David Johnston, Professor of Spanish Studies at Queen's University, who translated La Chunga for its current presentation.

"My father thought my interest in literature was a passport to failure," commented Vargas Llosa, "but without my father I wouldn't have had the strength to keep up my literary vocation which had no practical place in the wider world."

At 13 years of age Vargas Llosa was dispatched to a military academy: "My father thought it would eradicate my literary fantasies but instead it gave me my first novel." This was The Time of the Hero, published in 1962.

The book was burned in Vargas Llosa's old academy but won wide praise abroad, heralding his arrival onto the world literary stage.

After he left the barracks, he began work as a crime reporter with a Lima daily, immersing himself in the world of brothels, bars and disillusioned hacks, which provided more atmosphere for his subsequent novels.

At 19 years of age he scandalised his parents by falling in love with "Aunt" Julia, his uncle's sister-in-law, 13 years his senior; he married her through a dispensation obtained by Cardinal Landazuri, yet another cousin. The experience proved the raw material for his most acclaimed work, the hilarious Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, subsequently adapted for Hollywood.

Vargas Llosa discovered politics at Lima's San Marcos University, as the country endured another period of military rule. A steady diet of Marx, Engels and Lenin resulted in a brief flirtation with Peru's Communist Party, where Mario became Comrade Alberto, until literature got the upper hand.

Since the 1960s, Vargas Llosa has spent most of his time abroad, teaching writing in England and Spain until 1974, although his novels have been almost exclusively set in Peru.

The event which sparked Vargas Llosa's entry into formal politics in 1987 was his angry opposition to plans by the government of President Alan Garcia (1985-90) to nationalise Peru's banks. It was also a moment when state repression, hyper-inflation and brutal guerrilla warfare had left the country on the verge of total collapse.

Vargas Llosa addressed public rallies and formed the "Libertad" movement, becoming an enthusiastic free market advocate and citing Margaret Thatcher and Milton Friedman as his main influences.

His candidacy appealed to the Peruvian middle-class but failed to gain a hold among "Peru profundo," the hermetic world of rural Peru and the city's chaotic urban shantytowns.

Afterwards he commented: "Literature and politics are mutually exclusive. A writer is someone who works alone, who needs total independence. A politician is someone who is totally dependent, who has to make all kinds of concessions, the very thing a writer can't do. Never again."

He was defeated by the then virtually unknown Alberto Fujimori, who subsequently dismantled the country's democratic institutions.

Vargas Llosa's wife came up with a perceptive explanation of Mario's move into politics; "he wanted to write the great novel in real life." The writer's attitude to that period has mellowed considerably, helped by the catharthic effect of A Fish in the Water, (1993) his compelling memoir which analyses the electoral experience with brutal honesty.

Vargas Llosa currently lives in London, a city he finds conducive to the hectic literary pace he has set for himself: "the weather is bad, the food is bad, you have nothing to do but write," he said.

One person asked the author whether he was concerned about the "corrupting influence" of violent scenes in his books.

"Violence is part of the human experience," responded the author, "If you accept literature then you have to accept that everything that is human is part of that reality."

He might also have added that fictional representation of violence tends to pale beside Amnesty International's annual reports from the region, Peru in particular.

"I have got enormous pleasure from your books," said another middle-aged Belfast man, concluding the round of audience questions, "could you promise another book as good as the last?"

La Chunga runs at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast until November 25th, as part of the Belfast Festival at Queen's