By Caitlin Espinoza

This year's Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa, marking a growing trend towards global appreciation for Latin American culture. Vargas Llosa received the award "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat". The Peruvian writer is one of a handful of contemporary Latin American novelists who have gained international recognition.

Mario Vargas Llosa is also a politician, playwright, critic and essayist, and holds many literary accolades, 66 including Spain's Cervantes Prize and the National Book Critics Award. In 1990, he ran, and lost, in Peru's presidency race. It is clear that Vargas Llosa is not shy about incorporating his political insights into everything from his writing to his daily life. In a 2002 interview with January Magazine he sums up his approach. "When you live in a democratic society -- with pluralism, a free press -- you lose perspective and don't remember this is the privilege of a very small portion of the world."

Mario Vargas Llosa is by no means alone as a cultural ambassador for Latin America. Since 1936 when Carlos Saavedra Lamas, an Argentine academic and politician, received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work as Argentina's foreign minister, there have been several Latin American Nobel Prize winners. Among them is Rigoberta Menchú, winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize, who dedicated her life to publicizing the struggle of Guatemala's indigenous people. Other Nobel Literature Prize winners include Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez.

The Nobel Prizes are awarded in the following categories: Nobel Prize in Physics, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Nobel Prize in Medicine, Nobel Prize in Literature, Nobel Peace Prize, and Nobel Prize in Economics. Since the creation of the prizes, there have been a total of fourteen Nobel Prize winners from Latin America, the majority having been awarded either the Nobel Peace Prize or the Nobel Prize in Literature. Mario Vargas Llosa is the sixth Latin American to win the prize for literature.

For more information on Nobel Prize winners, go to http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes