Mario Vargas Llosa wins Nobel prize

Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa has won the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature, 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 Spanish literary honour.

He is the first South American winner of the prestigious 10 million kronor (almost 1m) 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.

"I am very grateful to the Swedish Academy. It is totally unexpected, a real surprise," Vargas Llosa said. "I think it is, for any writer, a great encouragement, a recognition of a world."

Vargas Llosa has feuded with Venezuela's leftist president Hugo Chavez and often tosses barbs at Cuba's Fidel Castro. He irritated his centrist friend Paz, the late Mexican Nobel literature laureate, by playfully describing Mexico's political system - dominated at the time by a single party - as "the perfect dictatorship."

In a 1976 incident in Mexico City, Vargas Llosa punched oGarcia Marquez, whom he would later ridicule as "Castro's courtesan". It was never clear whether the fight was over politics or was personal, and the two have reportedly not spoken in decades.

After the Nobel announcement, a comment on a Twitter account attributed to Garcia Marquez said "now we're even" in Spanish. But Garcia Marquez's foundation in Colombia, said the Twitter account did not belong to the author.