Remember The Time Mario Vargas Llosa Punched Gabriel García Márquez?

Walker Caplan at Lit Hub:

Today in 1982, Gabriel García Márquez received the Nobel Prize for “his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts.” Twenty-eight years later, Mario Vargas Llosa would win for “his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” This double win could have been a source of joy for both of them; the two were longtime friends, and Vargas Llosa wrote his doctoral thesis on One Hundred Years of Solitude. Alas, in both 1982 and 2010, the two weren’t on speaking terms—because in 1976, a romantic scandal led Vargas Llosa to sucker punch Márquez in the face at a movie screening, ending their relationship.

more here.