Former Wilson Center Fellow Mario Vargas Llosa Wins 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature
The Swedish Academy said it honored Vargas Llosa for mapping the "structures of power and [for] his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt and defeat."
Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa won the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature as the academy honored one of the Spanish-speaking world's most acclaimed authors and an outspoken political activist who once came close to being elected president of 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.
While at the Wilson Center in 1980, Vargas Llosa worked on the manuscript for what would become "The War of the End of the World", one of the many works for which he has earned the reputation as one of the earliest pioneers of the 1960s literary movement.
"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."
