Herta Mueller

Herta Mueller

Herta Müller, the Romanian-born German novelist and essayist who has written widely about the oppression of dictatorship in her native country and the unmoored life of the political exile, on Thursday won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy described Ms. Müller, “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” Her award comes on the 20th anniversary ofthe fall of Communism in Europe.

Ms. Müller, 56, emigrated to Germany in 1987 after years of persecution and censorship in Romania. She is the first German writer to win the Nobel award since Günter Grass in 1999. Just four of her works have been translated into English, including the novels “The Land of Green Plums” and “The Appointment.” “I am very surprised and still cannot believe it,” Ms. Müller said in a statement released by her publisher in Germany. “I can’t say anythingmore at the moment.” In the news conference making the announcement in Stockholm, Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said Ms. Müller had been honored because of her “very, very distinct special language, on the one hand, and on the other hand she has really a story to tell about growing up in a dictatorship ... and growing up as a stranger in your own family.”

Ms. Müller was born and raised in the German-speaking town of Nitzkydorf in Romania. Her father served in the SS during World War II, and her mother was deported to the Soviet Union in 1945 and sent to a work campin what is now Ukraine. As a university student studying German and Russian literature, Ms. Müller opposed the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu and joined Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of dissident writers who sought freedom of speech. She wrote her first work, a collection of short stories, in 1982 while working as a translator for a factory. The stories were censored by the Romanian authorities and Ms. Müller was fired from the factory after refusing to work withthe Securitate secret police. While working as a kindergarten teacher, the uncensored manuscript of “Niederungen,” — or “Lowlands” — was smuggled to Germany and published there to instant critical acclaim.