Fri, Oct 08, 2010 page1

• Vargas Llosa of Peru wins Nobel Literature Prize

  POWER AND STRUGGLE: Writer and journalist Mario Vargas Llosa, who once ran for president, said that the award was a recognition of Latin American literature

  • AFP
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  Mario Vargas Llosa, a giant of Latin American literature whose political ambitions saw him run for president of his native Peru, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature yesterday at the age of 74.

  Vargas Llosa, long tipped to win the award, is best known for works such as Conversation in the Cathedral and The Feast of the Goat, but is also a prolific journalist, still writing for Spain’s El Pais daily.

  Vargas Llosa has won a string of major literary awards, including the most prestigious of all for a Spanish-language author, the Cervantes Prize, and had often been tipped to win the Nobel prize but said he had no inkling that he would win this time round.

  

  This year’s Nobel Prize winner for literature, Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, stands in front of a portrait of him by Colombian artist Fernando Botero Angulo as he visits an exhibition about his work, Mario Vargas Llosa, La liberte et la vie, at the Maison de l’Amerique Latine in Paris on Sept. 13.

  Photo: AFP

  “I didn’t even think that I was one of the candidates,” he told Colombia’s RCN radio in an interview in New York shortly after learning that he had received the prize.

  “I think it is a recognition of Latin American literature and literature in the Spanish language, which is something that all of us can be happy about,” he said.

  Announcing the award, the academy hailed “his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.”

  Born in Arequipa, Peru, Vargas Llosa grew up with his mother and grandfather in the city of Cochabama, Bolivia, before moving back to Peru in 1946.

  He then became a journalist, moving to France in 1959 where he worked as a language teacher and as a journalist for Agence France-Presse and for French television.

  His first major success came with the novel The Green House, which appeared in English in 1966. He has since continued to produce a string of bestsellers, many of which deal with political themes and the troubled history of Latin America.

  He ran for the Peruvian presidency in 1990 on a center-right ticket, but was badly beaten by Alberto Fujimori, who later fled the country after a string of political scandals.

  Disappointed by his defeat and upset at the dictatorial turn of Fujimori’s 1990 to 2000 regime, Vargas Llosa took on Spanish nationality in 1993 — a controversial move that angered many Peruvians.

  In 1994, he was elected to Spain’s Royal Academy of Language, the final authority in Spanish-language grammar and vocabulary.

  Unlike other literary figures who seek to avoid the limelight, Vargas Llosa embraces contemporary affairs with gusto. He writes regularly for newspapers and magazines and travels frequently for research and to deliver lectures.

  “A writer must never turn into a statue” he said in an interview last year.

  “I have never liked the idea of a writer stuck in his library, cut off from the world, like Proust was. I need to keep a foothold in reality, know what’s going on. That’s why I do journalism,” he said in an interview last year.

  Fellow Latin American authors said the award was very deserved.

  “This is very good news,” fellow author Carlos Mueller said.

  Another author, Leonardo Martinez Ugarte, said: “I have a love-hate relation with Llosa because I do not agree with his politics but as an author, I have to take my hat off to him.”
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