RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Peruvian-Spanish writer Mario Vargas Llosa will be decorated this Monday by the government of Ecuador to contribute to the dissemination and promotion of literature, the Secretariat of Communication advised on Sunday.
The writer – winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for literature – will be honored in a ceremony at the Carondelet Palace headed by President Guillermo Lasso. He will be awarded the medal for “merit in the Order of the Grand Cross”, sources from the Presidency said.
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With it, Ecuador will recognize “the invaluable contribution to the dissemination and cultural promotion of the novelist, essayist, and writer of Peruvian and Spanish nationality,” they added.
Vargas Llosa arrives in Ecuador on a private plane, and tomorrow, he will be in Quito for just a few hours for the ceremony.
The author of “La fiesta del Chivo” or “La tía Julia y el escribidor”, among his many works, has participated this week in Mexico in the IV Mario Vargas Llosa Novel Biennial, which runs until today, Sunday, in the city of Guadalajara (western Mexico).
The medal will be presented to him by President Lasso, a writer, friend, and felllow conservative.
ABOUT VARGAS LLOSA
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa, more commonly known as Mario Vargas Llosa, is a Peruvian writer, journalist, essayist, college professor, and former politician.
Some critics consider him to have had a more significant international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. In 2010 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his cartography of power structures and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”
He also won the 1967 Rómulo Gallegos Prize, the 1986 Prince of Asturias Award, the 1994 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1995 Jerusalem Prize, the 2012 Carlos Fuentes International Prize, and the 2018 Pablo Neruda Order of Artistic and Cultural Merit.
Vargas Llosa rose to international fame in the 1960s with novels such as The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los Perros, literally The City and the Dogs, 1963/1966), The Green House (La casa verde). His latest novel – Tiempos Recios (Fierce Times) – is a quasi-prequel, set in Guatemala, to La Fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat), a fictional chronicle of the murder of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.