The Time of the Hero (original title: La ciudad y los perros, literally "The City and the Dogs", 1963) is a 1963 novel by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize in 2010. It was Vargas Llosa's first novel and is set among the cadets at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, which he attended as a teenager. The novel portrays the school so scathingly that its leadership burned many copies and condemned the book as Ecuadorian propaganda against Peru. It won the 1962 Premio Biblioteca Breve for best unpublished novel and the 1963 Premio de la Critica Espanola.