The Nobel Prize in Literature 2010 was awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat," announced Peter Englund, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy on Thursday.

File photo of Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa attending the International Book Fair in Guadalajara December 3, 2009. Mario Vargas Llosa won 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature October 7, 2010. [Xinhua]

Mario Vargas Llosa made his international break-through with the novel "The Time of the Hero" in 1966.

He is the first Latin American winner for literature since 1990.

Varga Llosa is a political author in many ways. Yet, he also kept distance from politics even though he even became presidential candidate in Peru in 1990.

Born in 1936 in Peru, Mario Vargas Llosa grew up with his mother. Later he was sent to a military school by his father. He moved to Paris in 1959 and worked as a teacher and a journalist for French news agency, AFP.

In recent years he lived in Barcelona, Madrid, Lima, Paris and London and lectured in many universities in the world.

His works built on his experiences of life in Peru in the late 1940s and the 1950s.

"He is one of the great authors in the Spanish speaking world," commented Englund.

He will win the 10 million Swedish kronor (1.47 million U.S. dollars) prize.

Last year's literature prize went to German writer Herta Muller.

This was the fourth of this year's Nobel Prizes.

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Monday.

Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite, established the Nobel Prizes in his will in 1895. The first awards were handed out six years later.

Besides the monetary prize, each award includes a diploma, a gold medal and an invitation to the prize ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10. The peace prize is handed out in Oslo.