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NEW YORK — Isabel Allende is "touched" by the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa.
"I am very, very happy for this greatly deserved award," the Chilean author said Friday in an e-mail.
"Mario Vargas Llosa has been on the minds of the Swedish Academy members for over a decade because they became aware of his merits as a writer with extraordinary narrative talent, and they saw him as an intellectual and as an observer of the political and social reality of our time," she said.
Vargas Llosa, whose acclaimed novels include "The Feast of the Goat," is the first Spanish-speaking writer to be honored since Mexican Octavio Paz, in 1990. Among other Latin American authors who are Nobelists: Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Chilean Pablo Neruda.
"It touches me that he is the recipient of the Nobel Prize and that this award will once again bring world's attention to Latin American literature," said Allende, whose best-seller novels include "The House of the Spirits" and the recent "The Island Beneath the Sea."
