Many critics would argue that Mario Vargas Llosa deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, when, at the age of forty-five, he published his ‘Tolstoyan’ epic, The War of the End of the World (La guerra del fin del mundo). So precocious was Vargas Llosa's talent that the 1966 publication of The Green House (La casa verde), his second novel – and a fully-fledged classic – had already persuaded many readers that this thirty-year-old Peruvian was one of the twentieth century's great novelists. This essay looks back at The Green House, the first winner of the epoch-making Rómulo Gallegos Prize in Caracas in 1967, and its predecessor, The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros, 1963), winner of the 1962 Biblioteca Breve and Formentor Prizes in Spain. His first book, the short story collection Los jefes (‘The Leaders’), had also won a prize in Spain in 1958 – and Vargas Llosa's first two visits to Europe, Paris in 1958 and Spain in 1959, were also thanks to European prizes. Half a century later, he finally has the full collection.

In the end the great surprise was not that his two remarkable early novels could hardly be improved on – was Sentimental Education an improvement on Madame Bovary, or Anna Karenina on War and Peace? – but rather, in the first place, that the Nobel committee waited so long to honour him, and in the second place, that after waiting so long they unexpectedly changed their collective mind, belatedly giving him, at the age of seventy-four, the ultimate recognition he so obviously deserved.