nobel prize winner

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2009

Herta Müller
Born: 17 August 1953, Nitzkydorf, Banat, Romania
Residence at the time of the award: Germany
Prize motivation: "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed"

A Life under Dictatorship

Herta Müller is a German-Romanian writer. In her twenties, she worked as a translator in a machine factory, but had to stop when the Romanian secret police wanted her as a spy. Her first book 'Niederungen' (1982, English title: 'Nadirs') dates from this period, but was censored in Romania. In 1987 she emigrated to Germany. Herta Müller writes short stories, novels, poems and essays, but all her work deals with the experience of oppression, of exile and of conforming to family and state.