Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize for Literature 2010

Mario Vargas Llosa saw a lifetime's dream come true. The Spanish-Peruvian writer today collected the Nobel Prize for Literature at the Swedish Academy, where last Tuesday he delivered his acceptance speech. The author of The Feast of the Goat received the award from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden.

The ceremony, presided over by the Swedish royal family, was held with all its trademark pomp. The Academy defined Vargas Llosa as a "citizen of the world, a poet and historian, heir to the tradition of the great literary classics of the last century."

Having closely followed the ceremony, the Nobel Laureate bowed to the Swedish King, who gave him a diploma and gold medal bearing the face of Alfred Nobel. Vargas Llosa, 74, was the fourth to receive his award, and followed the winners of the prizes for Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, and Economics.

"My dear Mario Vargas Llosa; you have encapsulated 20^th-century history in a bubble of imagination. It has floated on the air for 50 years and shines still," said Per Wästberg, the representative of the Swedish Academy, before inviting the writer to approach the king to collect the prize.

In addition to Vargas Llosa, prize winners included Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides, in Economics, who won the prize this year for their analysis of markets with search frictions, which helps match supply and demand in the labor market; Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, in Physics, for their discovery of a new material, graphene; Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki, in Chemistry, for their development of key tools in organic chemistry; and Robert Edwards, in Medicine, for the development of in vitro fertilization in the 1950's.

Further information

In Praise of Fiction (Mario Vargas Llosa's acceptance speech) (in Spanish)

Vargas Llosa's talent for language (in Spanish)

Vargas llosa: A novel can change the course of history