Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent guardian.co.uk, Thursday 7 October 2010
Mario Vargas Llosa: 'It’s been a surprise, very nice, but a surprise'. Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images
Mario Vargas Llosa greeted his Nobel prize for literature with astonishment and delight today having long considered himself "too liberal" for the Swedish academy.
The 74-year-old Peruvian-born author thought it was a joke when he received a pre-dawn phone call in New York, where he is teaching a semester at Princeton University, with news that he had beaten hotly tipped writers from the US, Africa and Europe.
"For years I haven't thought about the Nobel prize at all. They didn't mention me in recent years so I didn't expect it. It's been a surprise, very nice, but a surprise. At first I thought it was a joke," he told RPP Noticias.
The awarding committee said in a statement it chose Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt and defeat".
The one-time Peruvian presidential candidate has been a leading Latin American voice since his 1963 breakthrough novel The Time of the Hero. More than 30 novels, plays and essays have been translated into more than 30 languages. Masterpieces include Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977) and The Feast of the Goat (2000).
He is South America's first laureate since Colombia's Gabriel García Márquez won in 1982. Once close friends, the pair have sustained a famous feud since a punch-up in a Mexican cinema in 1976.
Full story at The Guardian
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