Peru’s Vargas Llosa wins 2010 Nobel Literature prize
By ANIThursday, October 7, 2010
STOCKHOLM - Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa has won the 2010 Nobel prize for literature.
The Nobel Prize committee said in a statement Vargas Llosa received the award “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat”.
The 74-year-old writer is the first South American to win the Nobel since Colombian magic-realist innovator Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1982. Mexico’s Octavio Paz won the prize in 1990.
Like Paz and many other Latin American authors, Vargas Llosa has dabbled in politics over the years. He even ran, unsuccessfully, for the the Peruvian presidency in 1990.
From the publication of his first novel, 1963 — The Time of the Hero, based on his experiences at a Peruvian military academy, Vargas Llosa is recognized as a leading figure in the Latin American literature in the second half of the 20th century.
He has written essays, non-fiction, and fiction in a wide variety of genres and styles.
The Green House is widely considered among his best works. It is a non-chronological account of unrest in Peru centered on the desert brothel of the title.
The bitter 1969 novel Conversations in the Cathedral embeds a critique of the dictatorship of Peruvian president Manuel Odria in the story of one man’s search for the truth about his minister father’s role in the murder of a notorious underworld figure.
In the 2000 novel The Feast of the Goat (published in the U.S. in 2002), Vargas Llosa makes a startlingly unsympathetic, Shakespeare-worthy villain of Rafael Trujillo, the real-life military despot who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930-61.
Many Americans may know Vargas Llosa best for his 1977 comic novel, Aunt Julia and the Screenwriter, which was adapted into American director Jon Amiel’s widely praised movie Tune in Tomorrow, starring Peter Falk as a larger-than-life creator of radio soap operas who manipulates the May-December relationship of a young aspiring writer (Keanu Reeves) and his older, twice-divorced aunt by marriage (Barbara Hershey). (EW’s Owen Gleiberman said the film “crackles with romantic heat.”)
The prize of 10 million Swedish crowns (1.50 million dollars) was the fourth of this year’s Nobel prizes, following awards for medicine on Monday, physics on Tuesday and chemistry on Wednesday. (ANI)
