Lech Wałęsa—the former President of Poland, world-renowned Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and human rights activist—was the cofounder and leader of the Polish trade union Solidarity (Solidarnosc). He helped lead the popular movement to challenge the totalitarian grip of communism in Poland, which ultimately sparked uprisings across Eastern Europe and led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transition to a free-market economy. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the European Human Rights Prize, Eisenhower Medallion, Liberty Medal, Premio Galileo, Grand Cross of Legion of Honour, National Order of the Southern Cross, Order of Merit of the Italian Republic 1st Class, International Democracy Award, Knight with the Collar of the Order of Pius IX, Presidential Medal of Freedom, Knight Grand Cross of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, and thirty honorary doctorates from universities around the world.
UPDATE: Under a new travel embargo by his doctors for health reasons, President Wałęsa will now accept his award and give an exclusive interview for Gala attendees by video.

The world-acclaimed novelist, politician, journalist, and essayist Mario Vargas Llosa is the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." A Marxist in his youth, Mr. Vargas Llosa broke with socialism and embraced the ideas of Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin and F. A. Hayek in supporting free and open societies, and subsequently ran for President of Peru in 1990, barely losing. A member of the Royal Spanish Academy, he is the author of 27 books and 9 plays. He has also received the National Book Critics Award (twice), Miguel de Cervantes Prize, Leopoldo Alas Prize, Premio Planeta, St. Louis Literary Award, Rómulo Gallegos Prize, Peruvian National Prize, Critics’ Annual Prize for Theatre, Prince of Asturias Prize, and Irving Kristol Award, and in 2010, he was decreed by King Juan Carlos I to become the 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa.

Having pioneered an entire new understanding of individual liberty, economic welfare and the nature of government power, the economist and historian Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute and Founding Editor of the quarterly The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy. Dr. Higgs’s many path-breaking books include Crisis and Leviathan (Oxford University Press); Depression, War, and Cold War (Oxford University Press); and Competition and Coercion (Cambridge University Press). He is the recipient of the Friedrich von Wieser Memorial Prize, Thomas Szasz Award, Lysander Spooner Award, and Gary Schlarbaum Award, and a festschrift in his honor, Government and the American Economy: A New History, has been published by the University of Chicago Press.