Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa takes Nobel literature prize

MARIO Vargas Llosa was not the bookies' choice, as the academy again eschewed US writers.

Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has won the 2010 Nobel Literature Prize. Picture: AFP

MARIO Vargas Llosa was not the bookies' choice, as the academy again eschewed US writers.

PERUVIAN novelist and would-be president Mario Vargas Llosa last night won the Nobel Prize in literature, a decision that rewarded a well-known and best-selling author while entrenching a trend that has seen political writers dominate the world's most important literary award.

Vargas Llosa, 74, who ran unsuccessfully for his country's presidency in 1990 and has shifted from Left to Right politically, was awarded the $1.5 million prize "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt and defeat", the Swedish Academy said in a statement.

He is the first writer from South America to win the world's most important literary prize since Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1982. Speaking on Colombian radio from New York after winning the prestigious award, Vargas Llosa said: "I didn't even think I was one of the candidates. I think it is a recognition of Latin American literature and literature in the Spanish language, which is something that all of us can be happy about."

Asked which of his works was his favourite, he replied: "It's like asking, 'which is your favourite child?' It's something that you couldn't say, even if you did have a preference. If I have to choose a book, it would probably be the one that I have yet to write."

The academy once again eschewed American writers, despite Cormac McCarthy being the dominant bookies' favourite.

The last American to win the Nobel was Toni Morrison in 1993. Australia, too, will have to wait at least another year to repeat the sole success of Patrick White in 1973, despite poet Les Murray and novelist Gerald Murnane being touted as candidates this year.

Melbourne-based literary critic Peter Craven said Vargas Llosa's win should put paid to the perception the Nobel was the purview of relatively obscure writers, following the wins of Romanian-born German novelist Herta Muller last year and French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio in 2008.

"Vargas Llosa has been recognised for decades as one of the greatest novelists in the world," he said. "He didn't need to win the Nobel Prize, but perhaps the Nobel Prize needed to recognise a writer like him."

The Australian's chief literary critic, Geordie Williamson, said: "Vargas Llosa is a cosmopolitan figure, a man whose political conservatism is almost at odds with his liberated fiction. He's a radical Tory with an amazing imagination." Vargas Llosa has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays, including Conversation in the Cathedral and The Green House. In 1995, he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honour.

His international breakthrough came with the 1960s novel The Time of The Hero, which was considered controversial in his homeland - a thousand copies were burnt publicly by officers from Peru's military academy. More recently, he came to international attention with Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1982), made into a Hollywood film.

Born in Arequipa, Peru, Vargas Llosa grew up with his grandparents in Bolivia after his parents divorced. The family moved back to Peru in 1946 and he later went to military school before studying literature and law in Lima and Madrid. In 1959, he moved to Paris, where he worked as a language teacher and a journalist.

Additional reporting: Agencies