Nobel winner Mario Vargas Llosa rules out Peru presidency rerun

Nobel literature prizewinner Mario Vargas Llosa said today he would not run again for the presidency of Peru, saying his 1990 candidacy was due to exceptional circumstances.

While in Sweden to collect his 10m krona (£600,000) prize, Vargas Llosa said he stood against Alberto Fujimori 20 years ago because the country's "very fragile democracy was shaking and on the point of collapse".

He added: "We had practically a civil war … we had hyper-inflation … it was because of those circumstances that I had the necessity of political participation. I certainly won't repeat this experience."

Vargas Llosa was among the leaders of the resurgence in Latin American literature in the 1960s. He lost to Fujimori, who tackled the country's inflation and Maoist guerrillas but is now in jail for human rights abuses.

Vargas Llosa, 74, said he hoped the presidential election in Peru next year would strengthen democracy and the rule of law, and build on the peace of recent years.

A champion of the left in his youth, Vargas Llosa shifted later in life across the political spectrum, angering much of Latin America's leftist intelligentsia.

He said, however, he remained a liberal: "I am totally against all forms of authoritarianism and … totalitarianism."

Vargas Llosa made his international breakthrough in the 1960s with The Time of the Hero, a novel about cadets at a military academy in Lima. Many of his works are built on his experiences of life in Peru in the late 1940s and 1950s.

"The point of departure for all [my] stories are some personal experiences that are preserved by my memory and that awake in my imagination the enthusiasm to fantacise around," he said.

The Swedish Academy singled out his "cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt and defeat".

Vargas Llosa said winning the prize had been a shock and that his life had "entered into a vortex" afterwards.

"The way in which the Nobel prize is deserved, for me, is a total mystery," he said. "I still wonder if it is real or a kind of universal misunderstanding."

He picked French novelist Gustave Flaubert as having the most influence on him. He also said he would give the Nobel Literature prize to Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges – after resurrecting him, as only living writers can be honoured by the Nobel committee.