Mario Vargas Llosa, recipient of the 2010 Nobel Award for Literature, is on a three-day official visit in Cluj-Napoca, Romania following the invitation of Babes-Bolyai University (UBB). Vargas Llosa has been awarded today the Doctor Honoris Causa of UBB Cluj-Napoca in front of the Senate, academia and local officials. The UBB Rector praised the talent with which Llosa reconstructs the Peruvian universe.
Mario Vargas Llosa in Cluj-Napoca / Credit: Radu Padureanu, Ziua de Cluj
Vargas Llosa on storytelling: “Storytelling is as important to me as it is to everybody, we need fiction to complement our life, and without fiction our life would be very poor and average. I believe that we need to enrich our life, and hence we invented fiction; literature is probably the best means through which fiction can integrate life for everybody, men or women. I believe fiction is something that allows us to materialize this dream that we all have in not being limited to a single life, but to have the possibility to live so many experiences; I think this is the reason why fiction was born and for this reason literature has had such a long history in people’s life”.
Mario Vargas Llosa in Cluj-Napoca / Credit: Ziua de Cluj
UPDATE: All comments are welcome, however I choose not to publish comments that are offensive. This post celebrates literature not a writer’s biography. Thank you 🙂
The funny thing is that fiction is often tamer than real life. 🙂 I love what he has to say about storytelling and fiction. Really where would we be without fiction?
He is right, isn’t he? 🙂 There are books that I may read twice with the same excitement as the 1st time 🙂