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Herta Mueller, a Romanian born German writer, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, inform AP and Reuters.

Writer Herta Mueller was born on August 17, 1953, at Nitchidorf, in Banat (a region in western Romania). She studied philology in Timisoara (western Romania) and it is there too that she made her debut as a prose writer by writing the memories of her childhood in a way that shocked many readers.

Her first book, “Niederungen” (“Nadirs”), which was completed in 1978, only appeared in 1982 after a bitter confrontation with the censorship at the communist time that seriously shortened her manuscript. Two years later the above-mentioned book was also published in the Federal Republic of Germany exactly as it had been written by the author.

The authorities in Romania had a harsh reaction: she was forbidden to publish any more texts. Following her refusal to collaborate with the Securitate, she was fired and sent to an enterprise where she subsequently worked as a translator. In 1987 she emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany and settled in Berlin. She got numerous invitations to teach at various universities in Great Britain, the United States and Switzerland.

The recurrent subjects in this author’s poetry and prose are: separation, emigration, leaving a place without reaching a destination. Her essays illustrate Romania’s past, her own past, the reality of the life before 1990 and the reality after 1990. Her book titled “Herztier” (“The Land of Green Plums”), which was translated into Romanian by Nora Iuga and published in 2006 by the Polirom Publishing House, was awarded the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1989 for the best book by a foreign author.

Also published in Romanian were “The King Bows and Kills” by the Polirom Publishing House in 2005 and “Ion Is or Is Not,” a collection of poems published by the Polirom Publishing House in 2005. The author’s most recent book, which was translated into Romanian by Nora Iuga, is “A Lady Lives in the Hair Knot,” published in 2006. She published more than 20 books that were quite successful with readers and critics, currently being considered one of the most important authors writing in German.

Herta Mueller’s literature and her courageous involvement in observing human rights, in getting freedom and democracy, in clarifying the dictatorial past, both the communist and the fascist one, made her take a top place in European literature and be an important political personality.

Since she settled in Germany she has been awarded numerous German and international prizes, from among which mention should be made of the following: the Ricarda-Huch Prize (1987), the Kleist Prize (1994) and the Joseph-Breitbach Prize (2003), the European Aristeion Prize (1995), the Franz-Kafka Prize (1999), the Literature Prize of Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (2004), the Würth Prize for European Literature (2006).

She is a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry. Starting in 1999, she has twice been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dailies such as Neue Zurcher Zeitung or Die Welt published extensive leading articles on her and the prestigious literary journal TEXT+KRITIK devoted to her Book 155/2002.