Vargas Llosa had his first success as a writer of fiction with the play La huida del inca [The Inca's Escape] which he wrote in 1951, aged fifteen. Encouraged by his uncle he submitted it to a contest of children's plays organized by the Ministry of Education and won second place. In 1952, his school in Piura gave him the chance to put on a performance of this play at the Teatro Variedades under his own direction. Vargas Llosa fondly recalls the exciting process of bringing a piece of writing to life on the stage, even though he dismisses the play itself as a ‘soap opera with Incas’, not worth remembering. He has never published the work and never revealed much about its content, but he admits carrying on him as a talisman a programme note of its performance in Piura. What he does, however, mention in his memoirs is the play's subtitle: Drama incaico en tres actos, con prológo y epílogo en la época actual (El pez, p. 122) [An Inca drama in three acts, with a prologue and an epilogue in the contemporary era] (Fish, p. 119). It is interesting to see that this format not only anticipates the frequent use of prologue and epilogue in Vargas Llosa's later work, but also reveals the interplay between two levels of time, present and past, already in this early play, a feature that will later come to define Vargas Llosa's novels as well as his theatrical work.