German writer Herta Müller has been honoured with the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. The announcement was made by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on Thursday, 8 October 2009. It said Müller “depicts the landscape of the dispossessed” with “the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose”. The award is linked with some 1.1 million euros in prize money. The news took the author, who lives in Berlin, totally by surprise: “I still can’t believe it; I can’t say anything more at the moment.”
Michael Krüger, the publisher at Carl Hanser Verlag, which has published Herta Müller’s books, immediately congratulated the author: “With the award to Herta Müller, who grew up in the German-speaking minority in Romania, an author is being honoured who still insists on remembering the inhuman aspects of state communism 20 years after the end of the East-West conflict. Her literary work of mourning is a meaningful example of a committed European literature that takes our history into the present with analytical incisiveness and poetic precision.” Also a subject to which Müller’s latest novel is dedicated: Atemschaukel appeared in late summer 2009 and has been nominated for the 2009 German Book Prize. Using the example of a 17-year-old boy, she depicts the persecution of ethnic Germans in Romania under Stalin.
Herta Müller was born in Nitzkydorf, Romania, in 1953 and has lived in the German capital as a writer since 1987. She has received numerous German and international prizes for her works, including the Kleist Prize, the Joseph Breitbach Prize, the Würth Prize for European Literature and the Walter Hasenclever Literature Prize. The author has been a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry since 1995. After studying German and Romanian philology, she initially worked as a translator at an engineering factory. However, Herta Müller was dismissed after she refused to work for the Securitate, the Romanian secret police. Her first book Niederungen was only published in Romania in 1982 in censored form. In 1984 an uncensored original version of her work was published in Germany. Herta Müller was then no longer able to publish in Romania and was increasingly subjected to interrogations, house searches and threats by the Securitate. In 1987 she finally resettled in Germany.
