Llosa wins Nobel prize for literature

Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the most acclaimed writers in the Spanish-speaking world, has won the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature. Vargas Llosa has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays.

Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the most acclaimed writers in the Spanish-speaking world, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday.

The Swedish Academy said it honored the 74-year-old author "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt and defeat."

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.

Mario Vargas Llosa

His international breakthrough came with the 1960s novel

Vargas Llosa is the first South American winner of the prestigious Nobel Prize in literature since it was awarded to Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1982.