Mario Vargas Llosa Wins Nobel Lit Prize

Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa has won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Academy in Stockholm announced early today.

Vargas Llosa has written more than 30 novels, essays and plays, including Conversation in the Cathedral, Feast of the Goat and Death in the Andes. He’s racked up scores of literary honors, including Spain’s highest, the Cervantes Prize, in 1995, but the Nobel eluded him for decades, probably, many believe, because of his right-leaning political identity.

(See article from Christian Science Monitor here.)

A former leftist, Vargas Llosa gradually embraced economic liberalism and was an outspoken critic of Peru’s two-term president Alberto Fujimori, who shut down Congress and the judiciary in 1992 and ruled by decree.  The Peruvian author also has been an outspoken critic of leaders Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. Those stances made Vargas Llosa unpopular with the intelligentsia both in Latin America and Europe.

Now that Fujimori is now serving a 25-year jail sentence in Peru on human-rights abuses committed during the Shining Path years, Vargas Llosa’s original criticisms of the former president now appear trenchant, not reactionary.

Vargas Llosa never attacked Fujimori’s free-market economic plan, which the Japanese-Peruvian president borrowed from Vargas Llosa himself when the novelist ran against Fujimori in the 1990 presidential race.

So, with Fuji currently in jail, and Peru’s GDP surging by more than 10 percent this year, the timing is politically right, on the world stage, for the 74-year-old novelist to claim his literary desserts. I believe he’s earned them (see commentary, following).

The novelist was in New York City when the committee phoned him this morning. He expressed surprise that he was even on the shortlist, but I tend to doubt this. Vargas Llosa has wanted this prize for years and he must have been keeping track. Most likely, when he opened his eyes this morning, he knew it was Nobel day.