Mario Vargas Llosa Wins Nobel Prize

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On October 7, the Swedish Academy named Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2010. He was praised by the academy for his deeply political work and “for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat.”

Vargas Llosa was born in 1936 in Arequipa, Peru. He began his career as a journalist abroad and is now one of the most celebrated Spanish-speaking writers, having written more than 30 novels, plays, and essays. He had an international breakthrough in 1963 with the controversial novel The Time of the Hero, based on a Peruvian military school.

Vargas Llosa has lectured and taught at a number of universities in the USA, South America, and Europe. His well known works include Conversation in the Cathedral (1975; Conversación en la catedral, 1960), The War of the End of the World (1984; La guerra del fin del mundo, 1981 ), and The Feast of the Goat (2001; La fiesta del chivo, 2000).