Prize in Hand, He Keeps His Eye on Teaching

Mario Vargas Llosa, this year’s Nobel laureate in literature, is teaching a seminar at Princeton on the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, who was nominated but never won the Nobel.

By Julie Bosman, New York Times, October 29, 2010

 PRINCETON, N.J. — Five days after the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he walked into a Princeton classroom where 25 students awaited their weekly seminar on the magical realism of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.
(Author photo by James Leynse for The New York Times)

And then, said one astounded undergraduate, he pretended nothing had happened.
“Thank you very, very much,” he said, smiling broadly, according to students who were there and had presented him with a card and a spread of baked goods. “We’ll eat this during the break. But for now, let’s start class.”

Since he won the Nobel on Oct. 7, Mr. Vargas Llosa has been at the center of a whirlwind of attention — “a revolution in my life,” he said in an interview. “It’s really fantastic to experience directly what globalization means,” he said, even though “it has been very comic in some cases.”
He had one offer to invest the prize money — about $1.5 million — in an ice cream company. And someone writing from a remote village, he said, asked him to pay for an operation.


But amid the chaos, this high-flying international literary celebrity has faithfully kept up his duties as a college professor here. Twice a week he wakes up in his Manhattan apartment at 5:30 a.m. to prepare for his classes, one on Borges and the other on creative writing and techniques of the novel, before boarding a train.
The full report at NYT.