'Nobel is recognition of Spanish language'

Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa said the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to him on Thursday represented a world recognition of the Spanish language.

Vargas Llosa said hours after the Swedish Academy for Nobel prizes announced him this year's winner that it came as a "total surprise" because he thought he was out of the running in the past two decades.

Vargas Llosa, 74, said he thought he would be spending his days quietly in Lima, Madrid and New York until early Thursday, when he learned that he had won the most prestigious literary award in the world.

"I was not a candidate for the past 20 years," Vargas Llosa said. "Look, because of the Swedish Academy, my life has changed. It will be a mad house, but I will try to survive."

Full report here Hindustan Times

Mario Vargas Llosa – the ‘European-thinking’ author

The life of Peruvian-born author Mario Vargas Llosa is like the story of the prodigal son.

Peru’s most famous author was on Thursday awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. He has lived and worked for half his adult life in Europe and North America, winning numerous prizes along the way, among them the 1995 Cervantes Prize and the 1996 German Peace Prize sponsored by the German publishers and booksellers association.

As a result, the author is often referred to as a “European-thinking” writer.

But only three of Vargas Llosa’s numerous novels are not related to Peru. These are ‘The War at the End of the World’ and his two most recent works, ‘The Feast of the Goat: A Novel’ and ‘The Way to Paradise: A Novel’. Everything else by the Madrid-based author, who by his own account lived in more than 40 homes in his life, was about life in his native country.

Full report here Hindu

Literature Nobel for Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa (74), celebrated Peruvian-Spanish author and one of the most renowned novelists of his generation, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat".

After the award was announced, Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy said that Mr. Llosa was "one of the great Latin American storytellers — a master of dialogue who has been searching for the elusive concept known as the total novel, and who believes in the power of fiction to improve the world."

While Mr. Llosa is known for his prolific writing that included comedies and murder mysteries, his most powerful novels have contained commentary on historical and political conditions in his native Peru and other parts of Latin America. The "monumental" work that Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) represents for example, was deeply concerned with the ravaging of Peruvian politics and government under the dictatorship of Manuel A. Odría in the 1950s.

Full report here Hindu