Peruvian Author Takes 2010 Nobel for Literature

The Swedish Academy on Thursday announced that the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature will be 70 year-old Peruvian author, Mario Vargas Llosa.

Vargas has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays, including Conversation in the Cathedral and The Green House, and his writing is almost universally admired in Latin America, though his gradual embrace of market capitalism put him at odds with much of the hemisphere's intellectual elite.

Fellow Nobel laureate and Princeton University faculty member Toni Morrison praised his selection as a "brilliant choice," while the head of Vargas Llosa's U.S. publisher called him, "one of the world's greatest writers - an eloquent, unequaled champion of human freedom."