Mario Vargas Llosa wins 2010 Nobel prize for literature

STOCKHOLM - Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa has won this year’s Nobel prize for literature, the Swedish Academy announced in Stockholm Thursday.

The academy’s citation said he was awarded “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 the Peruvian city of Arequipa, but now lives in the Spanish capital Madrid.

His international breakthrough came with “The Time of the Hero”, translated into English in 1966, the academy said.

The novel was, however, considered controversial in Peru, with 1,000 copies burned at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy.

Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the academy, said Vargas Llosa’s work is in a similar vein to that of several authors the Peruvian admires - including Victor Hugo or Albert Camus - pointing to Vargas Llosa’s “interest in society.”

“His view is that authors should not just provide good entertainment, but also show the way… (and) speak the truth,” Englund told Swedish radio after the announcement.

Some two dozen of Vargas Llosa’s works have been translated into English, including the well-known “Conversation in the Cathedral”, “The War of the End of the World”, and “The Feat of the Goat”.

Vargas Llosa is also noted for his essays and journalism, having for instance contributed columns to the Spanish daily El Pais.

The literature prize was the fourth Nobel to be awarded this year, with prizes given out earlier in medicine, physics and chemistry.

The prizes, worth 10 million kronor ($1.5 million), were endowed by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite.