2010 Nobel Prize in Literature
The 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." The prize was announced by the Swedish Academy on 7 October 2010. Laureate. Mario Vargas Llosa was one of the leading writers in the Latin American boom. His extensive authorship consists mostly of novels characterized by rich language and spanning a wide range of genres. His works also include plays, essays, literary criticism and journalism. Reactions. The Nobel Prize in Literature awarded  to Mario Vargas Llosa was well received around the world. "The world recognizes the intelligence and the will of freedom and democracy by Vargas Llosa and it is an act of enormous justice" said Alan García, president of Peru. Spanish writer Javier Marías said "it is one of those prizes that never or almost never needs to be discussed." Novelist William Boyd paid tribute to "a great chroncicler of the highs and lows of our carnal and passionate adventures as human beings". The prize was also celebrated by Bernard Kouchner, foreign minister of France, Felipe Calderón, president of Mexico, and  the King of Spain Juan Carlos, among others. Vargas Llosa himself said he was delighted but surprised: "For years I haven't thought about the Nobel prize at all. They didn't mention me in recent years so I didn't expect it. It's been a surprise, very nice, but a surprise. At first I thought it was a joke," he told RPP Noticias. Nobel lecture. In his Nobel lecture "Elogio de la lectura y la ficción", delivered at the Swedish Academy on 7 December 2010, Vargas Llosa paid tribute to the power of fiction and said he believed  it was essential to a healthy society. "We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist," he argued. "Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be  better." Award ceremony presentation speech. In his award ceremony speech on 10 December 2010 Per Wästberg, member of the Swedish Academy and chairman of the Nobel committee for literature, said of Vargas Llosa: "Mario Vargas Llosa's writing has shaped our image of South America and has its own chapter in the history of contemporary literature. In his early years, he was a renewer of the novel; today, an epic poet of not only Latin American stature. His wide embrace enfolds all literary genres.", "Vargas Llosa has led us through unfamiliar milieux with an authority that lends the authenticity of  a 19th-century explorer. He links the narrative tradition of Balzac and Tolstoy to the modernistic experiments of William Faulkner." "Vargas Llosa's novels never bow to diktat; they are polyphonic and open to interpretation, emphasising the diversity of Latin America's social and ethnic patterns. He lends voice to the silenced and oppressed – an aesthetic feat and an ethical act. He has an unreserved interest in people – from presidents to prostitutes – and nothing is alien to him, from the arrogance of statesmen to love's subtlest plots." "Vargas Llosa believes in the force of literature. Without literature there would  be no rendition of mankind's possibilities and hidden places. It is a bulwark against prejudice, racism and intolerant nationalism, since in all great literature, men and women of the entire world are equally alive. It is harder to suppress a people that reads a lot." "So he has fought for freedom of expression and for human rights regardless of geography, and has done so with a passion for liberty and with political courage and common sense – these not always in harmony in important writers. In a time of tiresome narcissism he is what Émile Zola, André Gide and Camus  embodied: an example and a bellwether."