The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2010 is awarded to the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat".
Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa said Thursday that winning the Nobel Prize in literature gave recognition to a profession that makes him feel like “a citizen of the world.”
The 74-year-old writer spoke to The Associated Press and a small group of reporters in Manhattan, just hours after getting the news at 5:30 a.m. Thursday. He said he waited 40 minutes until the announcement was made public before being convinced “it was true.”
“It is totally unexpected, a real surprise,” he said. “I think it is, for any writer, a great encouragement, recognition of a world of my life.”
Vargas Llosa is one of the Spanish-speaking world’s most acclaimed authors and an outspoken political activist who once ran for president in his tumultuous homeland. He has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays, including “Conversation in the Cathedral” and “The Green House.” In 1995, he won the Cervantes Prize, the most distinguished literary honor in Spanish.
He is the first South American winner of the prestigious $1.5 million Nobel Prize in literature since Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez won in 1982.
While he has lived in different countries, Vargas Llosa said he has never cut off ties with Peru and follows developments there closely. His stories take place in his homeland.
But as a writer, he added, “I feel myself a citizen of the world.”
But as a writer, he added, “I feel myself a citizen of the world.”
The author, who had long been on a list of potential Nobel Prize candidates but not mentioned in recent years, joked that he would now be able to travel to Sweden “without awaking suspicions that I am lobbying for another prize.”
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