Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded this morning to Mario Vargas Llosa, the versatile Peruvian writer and politician, for what the Swedish Academy hailed as “his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” Mr. Vargas Llosa, who is 74, will receive the award, worth about $1.5-million, at a ceremony in December. His prolific writings include plays, literary criticism, journalism, and more than a dozen novels, several of which have been turned into movies. An early admirer of communism and the Cuban Revolution of Fidel Castro, Mr. Vargas Llosa, whose papers are stored at Princeton University, has steadily moved to the right in the course of his life, in part in reaction to brutal leftist guerrilla movements that have plagued his country. He ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of Peru in 1990 and since then has focused on his writing.

His work has been enough of a popular success that his English-language publishers have chiefly been commercial presses, but his two most-recent books in English were issued by university presses: The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables (Princeton, 2007) and Wellsprings (Harvard, 2008). This is the fourth Nobel Prize to be announced this week, following awards in medicine, physics, and chemistry. Still to come are the peace and economics prizes.