Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa has won the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature.
The awarding committee said 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 prize of 10 million Swedish krona (€1.07 million) was the fourth of this year's Nobel prizes, following awards for medicine on Monday, physics on Tuesday and chemistry yesterday.
Vargas Llosa (74) ran for president of Peru in 1990 and lost to Alberto Fujimori.
He has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays, including Conversation in the Cathedral and The Green House. In 1995, he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished
literary honour.
He began chronicling his country's ills with the publication of his first novel in 1963, The City and the Dogs, which told the tale of adolescents confronting the corruption of a military school.
His latest novel El Sueño del Celta ("The Dream of the Celt") is based on the life of Irish-born British diplomat and Irish nationalist Roger Casement. It will be published in Spanish this November.
The book involved four years of research, including trips to Congo and Banna Strand, in Co Kerry, where Casement was arrested in 1916.
Last year's Nobel literature prize went to Romanian-born novelist Herta Mueller, who escaped Nicolae Ceausescu's police state two years before the Berlin Wall fell and has become one of reunified Germany's best-known writers.
Winners in the last decade have included Turkish author Orhan Pamuk in 2006 and John M. Coetzee of South Africa in 2003.
The Nobel literature prize was created in the will of Alfred Nobel and first awarded in 1901.