Peruvian-born writer and one-time presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa, who has chronicled struggles for power, won the 2010 Nobel prize for literature, the awarding committee said on Thursday. The committee said in a statement Vargas Llosa received the award “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat”.
Vargas Llosa, who made his international breakthrough with the novel The Time of the Hero in 1966, is the first Latin American winner for literature since Octavio Paz won in 1990.
His works build on his experiences of life in Peru in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Vargos Llosa ran for President of Peru in 1990 but lost to Alberto Fujimori, who ultimately had to flee the country and was subsequently convicted of various crimes. “He is an outstanding author, and one of the great authors in the Spanish-speaking world,” Peter Englund of the Nobel committee said. “He is one of the persons behind the Latin-American literary boom of the ’60s and ’70s.”
—Reuters