Epress.am News from Armenia
Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the most acclaimed writers in the Spanish-speaking world who once ran for president in his homeland, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature Thursday, reports Canada’s CBC News.
The Swedish Academy said it honoured the 74-year-old author “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.”
Vargas Llosa has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays, including Conversation in the Cathedral and The Green House. In 1995, he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s most distinguished literary honour.
The academy’s permanent secretary, Peter Englund, described Vargas Llosa as a “divinely gifted story-teller,” whose writing touches the reader.
“He is one of the big authors in the Spanish-speaking world,” Englund said.
His international breakthrough came with the 1960s novel The Time of The Hero, which builds on his experiences from the Peruvian military academy Leoncio Prado. The book was considered controversial in his homeland and a thousand copies were burnt publicly by officers from the academy.
Vargas Llosa is the first South American winner of the prestigious 10 million kronor (about $1.5 million USD) Nobel Prize in literature since it was awarded to Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1982.
In the previous six years, the academy rewarded five Europeans and one Turk, sparking criticism that it was too euro-centric. Last year’s award went to German writer Herta Mueller.
Englund said Vargas Llosa was in New York on Thursday when he was told by telephone that he had won the prize. He is teaching this semester at Princeton University in New Jersey.
“He was very, very happy” Englund said. “And very moved.”