Mario Vargas Llosa receives Nobel Prize for literature
7th October 2010
Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa has been awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for literature.
The 74-year-old has written over 30 novels, plays and essays including The Bad Girl, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The Feast of the Goat and The Temptation of the Impossible.
He is the first South American to win the Nobel Prize since 1982, when it was taken by Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The Swedish Academy honoured Vargas Llosa 'for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt and defeat'.
Speaking recently at Princeton University in the US, the author said that good literature should not only entertain its readers, but leave them with a better understanding of the world.
First awarded in 1901, the Nobel Prize for literature was established to fulfil the wish of founder Alfred Nobel to recognise writers responsible for 'the most outstanding work in an ideal direction'.
Last year, the honour was awarded to German novelist Herta Muller. Past recipients include Orhan Pamuk, Harold Pinter, Saul Bellow and Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn.