Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa won the prize this year "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat," the Swedish Academy said in a statement.
The Monitor's book editor calls him "one of the greats of Latin American literature, a writer fully of the stature of other regional giants such as Jorge Luis Borges and Gabríel Garcia Márquez."
Then why, you might ask, has it taken so long to recognize him?
As Antonio Cisneros, a Peruvian poet who recently won one of Latin America’s top literature prizes, told the Monitor today is a dispatch from Peru, Mr. Vargas Llosa’s right-wing political activism is likely why it took the Nobel committee so many years before nodding to his achievements.
“Mario has deserved this prize for many years," says Mr. Cisneros, who recently won the Pablo Neruda Iberian-American poetry prize in Chile. "The only thing that kept him on the short list and not among the winners probably had to do with his politics. He has never kept his opinions quiet."
