President Juan Manuel Santos on Thursday telephoned Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa to congratulate him on winning the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Santos called Vargas Llosa a defender of freedom and democracy, in both his writing and his political life.
“I think for all of Latin America this Nobel Prize is great news, and for Colombia as well,” Santos said. “Mario Vargas Llosa has been a great friend of Colombia.”
Vargas Llosa was a 1990 presidential candidate in Peru, but did not win the election. The writer details his campaign in his autobiography “Like a Fish in Water.”
The Nobel Prize winner authored, among other novels, “The City and the Dogs” and “Conversation in the Cathedral.”
