Vargas Llosa to receive honorary doctorate

At a reception on June 23, award-winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa spoke about his career as a novelist and the tribulations involved in practicing the art.

The ceremony at the University of Granada in Spain was to celebrate the honorary doctorate the university bestowed on him today, June 24.

In his address he spoke of his two-year stay at Leoncio Prado Military School, and said it was there that he discovered “the truth” about his country: “the violence, the hurt, the bitterness and racism that so distanced Peruvians from each other.”

“My dad sent me to military school because he saw I had a literary vocation and thought the military could cure me of that sickness, but what he did was give me the subject for my first novel, ‘La Ciudad y los Perros’ (The Time of the Hero)”, he said.

Vargas Llosa, also honored with the Prince of Asturias for Literature and the Planeta, among other awards, believes that “this vocation should be a prize in itself for a writer who really loves literature, who wants to write not to be successful but to live according to his deepest desire.”

Vargas Llosa to Receive Spanish Award

On October 12 in Toledo, Spain, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa will receive the individual International Award of Don Quixote de la Mancha, which recognizes contributions to the Spanish language. Vargas Llosa previously won the Cervantes Award in 1994, considered the most noteworthy Spanish-language literature prize, and has long been considered a contender for a Nobel Prize.

President Arroyo of the Philippines will also be awarded the Don Quixote institutional prize for her efforts to reintroduce the Spanish language to her country's public school curricula.