Mario Vargas Llosa wins Nobel literature prize

Mtoday news

STOCKHOLM, Oct 7: Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa won the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday as the academy honored one of the Spanish-speaking world’s most acclaimed authors and an outspoken political activist who once ran for president in his tumultuous homeland.

Vargas Llosa, 74, has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays, including "Conversation in the Cathedral" and "The Green House." In 1995, he won the Cervantes Prize, the most distinguished literary honor in Spanish.

Vargas Llosa is the first South American winner of the prestigious 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) Nobel Prize in literature since Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez won in 1982.

"I am very surprised, I did not expect this," Vargas Llosa told Spanish National Radio, adding he thought it was a joke when he received the call.

"It had been years since my name was even mentioned," he added. "It has certainly been a total surprise, a very pleasant surprise, but a surprise nonetheless."

The Swedish Academy said it honored him for mapping the "structures of power and (for) his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat." Its permanent secretary, Peter Englund, called him "a divinely gifted storyteller" whose writing touched the reader.

"His books are often very complex in composition, having different perspectives, different voices and different time places," Englund said. "He is also doing it in a new way, he has helped evolve the art of the narration."

In the previous six years, the academy had rewarded five Europeans and one Turk with the literature Nobel, sparking criticism that it was too Euro-centric. Last year’s award went to German writer Herta Mueller.

The Swedish Academy has also previously been accused of favoring left-leaning writers, although the 16-member panel says its decisions are made on literary merit alone.

Vargas Llosa had long been mentioned as a possible Nobel candidate — he has won some of the Western world’s most prestigious literary medals and his works have been translated into 31 languages, including Chinese, Croatian, Hebrew and Arabic.

His writing is almost universally admired in Latin America but his gradual shift from the left toward an embrace of free-market capitalism has put him at odds with much of the hemisphere’s intellectual elite.

Vargas Llosa has feuded with Venezuela’s leftist President Hugo Chavez and often tosses barbs at Cuba’s Fidel Castro. He irritated his centrist friend Octavio Paz, the late Mexican Nobel literature laureate, by playfully describing Mexico’s political system — which was dominated at the time by a single party — as "the perfect dictatorship."

In a famous 1976 incident in Mexico City, Vargas Llosa punched out former friend Garcia Marquez, whom he would later ridicule as "Castro’s courtesan." It was never clear whether the fight was over politics or a personal dispute and the two have reportedly not spoken in decades.

After the Nobel announcement, a comment on a Twitter account attributed to Garcia Marquez said "now we’re even" in Spanish. However, Garcia Marquez’s foundation in Cartagena, Colombia, said the Twitter account did not belong to the author.

There was no reaction to the award from Garcia Marquez, who rarely speaks to the media.

Vargas Llosa has lectured and taught at a number of universities in the U.S., South America and Europe, and was spending this semester at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey.

Fellow Nobel laureate and Princeton faculty member Toni Morrison praised his selection as a "brilliant choice."

Jonathan Galassi, head of Vargas Llosa’s U.S. publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, called him "one of the world’s greatest writers — an eloquent, unequaled champion of human freedom."

Vargas Llosa emerged as a leader among the so-called "Boom" or "New Wave" of Latin American writers, bursting onto the literary scene in 1963 with his groundbreaking debut novel "The Time of the Hero" (La Ciudad y los Perros), which builds on his experiences at the Peruvian military academy Leoncio Prado.

The book won the Spanish Critics Award and the ire of Peru’s military. One thousand copies of the novel were later burned by military authorities, with some generals calling the book false and Vargas Llosa a communist.

The military academy "was like discovering hell," Vargas Llosa said later.