Mario Vargas Llosa

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa is known only as Mario Vargas Llosa. He was born in Arequipa, Perú, in 1936. He is a Peruvian-Spanish writer, politician, journalist and essayist. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most important novelists and essayists and he is one of the leading authors of his generation too. Critics considered him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom.

The Latin American Boom was born with him and he has helped  to define and identify a new generation of writers. 

His narrative is characterized by the importance of technical experimentation, so he is valued by  teachers as a novel composer.

Thoughout his career he has received a lot of awards and honours, such as the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 and the two top awards in the field of Hispanic literature: Romulo Gallegos Award (for his novel Green house, in 1967) and the Cervantes Award in 1994. 

He was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt and defeat.

His novels include comedies, murder mysteries, historical novels and political thrillers.

Vargas Llosa is a fan of Gustave Flaubert and of his novel Madame Bovary. Vargas has written about him and his book The Perpetual Orgy.

He is the president of International  PEN, the worldwide organization of writers. On 22nd November 1976 he sent a letter to the Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla. In it he claimed that the government forces and armed commandos in civilian clothes had persecuted intellectuals, abducted them from their homes and then they were murdered, tortured or disappeared without any news of their whereabouts. He also said that a lot of writers, artists and journalists moved of his coutry because they received death threats.

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Nobel Prize for literature, 2011.

Thomas Tranströmer has appeared among the list of nominees for this prize for many years, but it is his year. The Nobel Prize for literature for 2011 was awarded to the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. He was awarded about $1,5 million too. This is not the first literary award for Tranströmer: he was awarded the Bonnier prizes for poetry, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Oewvralids, the Petrache of Germany and the award from Swedish International Poetry Forum.

His daughter, Paula Tranströmer, says that she and her father were in shock.

She says he found out about five minutes before the announcement on television so he had not had time to prepare, so he was very calm, but she thinks he is still in shock.

Thomas Tranströmer was born in Stockholm in 1931. He is a psychologist, writer, poet and Swedish translator. International criticism considered him one of the most important Swedish poets.

Tranströmer is well known  for expressing a lot in a few words. His poetry has been translated into fifty languages.