The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa spoke to reporters in New York Thursday after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Nobel Committee honored Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.” Vargas Llosa is the first Latin American author to receive the prize since Mexico’s Octavio Paz won in 1990.

Mario Vargas Llosa: “I think Latin American literature deals with power and with politics, and I would say that this is inevitable. We in Latin America have not solved yet basic problems, like freedom, like stable institutions, tolerance, coexistence in diversity. We still have in Latin America, behind us, this atrocious tradition of authoritarianism and brutality, you know, in politics. So it’s very difficult for a Latin American writer to avoid politics and these problems that are, well, larger than politics. They are social, they are civic.”