According to AP:
Mario Vargas Llosa wins Nobel literature prize
Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the most acclaimed writers in the Spanish-speaking world, a man of letters who also braved the violence and political divisions of his homeland to run for president, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday.
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 honor.
The Swedish Academy said it honored the 74-year-old author for mapping the "structures of power and (for) his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt and defeat."
Vargas Llosa emerged as a leader among the so-called "Boom" or "New Wave" of Latin American writers, bursting onto the literary scene in 1963 with his groundbreaking debut novel "The Time of the Hero" (La Ciudad de los Perros), which builds on his experiences at the Peruvian military academy Leoncio Prado.
The book won the Spanish Critics Award and the ire of Peru's military. One thousand copies of the novel were later burned by military authorities, with some generals calling the book false and Vargas Llosa a communist.
The military academy "was like discovering hell," Vargas Llosa said later.
At 15, he was a night-owl crime reporter. Still in his teens, he joined a communist cell and eloped with his 33-year-old Bolivian aunt, Julia Urquidi — the sister-in-law of his uncle. He later drew inspiration from their nine-year marriage to write the comic hit novel "Aunt Julia and the Script Writer" (La Tia Julia y el Escribidor).
After they divorced, Vargas Llosa in 1965 married his first cousin, Patricia Llosa, 10 years his junior, and together they had three children.
In the 1970s, he denounced Castro's Cuba and slowly turned his political trajectory toward free market conservatism — sparking a fallout with many of his Latin American literary contemporaries.
In a famous incident in Mexico City in 1976, Vargas Llosa punched out his former friend, Garcia Marquez, whom he would later ridicule as "Castro's courtesan." It was never clear whether the fight was over politics or a personal dispute.
CHC: For Spanish speakers, make sure to read Vargas Llosa's stinging critique of the current Spanish government's stance towards the Cuban dictatorship, "Fidel Castro's Sad Whores."
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