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Nobel Prize Of 2010 In Literature
By KTM Metro Reporter
October 7, 2010: the Swedish Academy has awarded the Nobel Prize of 2010 in Literature to Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa 74 celebrated writer of the Spanish-speaking world for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.
The BBC NEWS on the Nobel Prize in Literature:
Vargas Llosa is the first South American winner of the 10 million kronor prize since 1982 when it went to Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In the previous six years, the academy awarded the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) prize to five Europeans and one Turk, sparking criticism that it was too Euro-centric.
The Swedish Academy's Peter Englund has said Vargas Llosa is "a divinely gifted story-teller," whose writing has touched the reader. Englund has added that the writer is in New York - where he is currently teaching at Princeton University.
The author has long been mentioned as a possible Nobel candidate - he has won some of the Western world's most prestigious literary medals including the Cervantes Prize in 1995 - the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor.
His works have also been translated into 31 languages, including Chinese, Croatian, Hebrew and Arabic.
The writer's international breakthrough came with the 1960s novel The Time of The Hero, which built on his experiences at the Peruvian military academy, Leoncio Prado. The book was considered controversial in his homeland and officers from the academy burned 1,000 copies publicly. His best-known works include Conversation In The Cathedral, The War of the End of the World and The Feast of the Goat.
Several books were made into movies including the 1990 Hollywood film Tune in Tomorrow, based on his novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which starred Barbara Hershey, Peter Falk and Keanu Reeves.
The author once had a great friendship with Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, about whom he wrote his doctoral thesis in 1971. But their relationship turned into one of literature's greatest feuds after Vargas Llosa punched Garcia Marquez at a theatre in Mexico City in 1976, leaving him with a black eye. The pair has never disclosed the reason for their dispute, although witnesses have suggested they fell out over a conversation between Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa's wife. In the intervening years, the authors fell out politically, too, with the Peruvian publicly criticizing Garcia Marquez's friendship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Relations appeared to thaw in 2007, however, when Vargas Llosa provided the foreword to the 40th anniversary edition of Garcia Marquez's classic work, A Hundred Years of Solitude. After the Nobel announcement on Thursday, Garcia Marquez - himself a Nobel laureate - tweeted: "cuentas iguales" ["now we're even" in Spanish].
Previously, Vargas Llosa had told the BBC's Latin American service that "a writer shouldn't think about the Nobel prize as it is bad for one's writing". Born in the town of Arequipa, Vargas Llosa took Spanish nationality in 1993 - three years after an unsuccessful bid for the Peruvian presidency.
Every Nobel laureate receives $1.5 million prize money.
