Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa won the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday as the academy honoured one of the Spanish-speaking world's most acclaimed authors and an outspoken political activist who once ran for president in his tumultuous homeland.
Vargas Llosa, 74, has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays, including Conversation in the Cathedral and The Green House. In 1995, he won the Cervantes Prize, the most distinguished literary honour in Spanish.
He is the first South American winner of the prestigious Nobel literature prize since Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez won in 1982 and the first Spanish-language writer to win since Mexico's Octavio Paz in 1990.