Herta Müller

The Nobel Laureate for Literature this year is Herta Müller, a Romanian born German novelist, poet, and essayist.

Her biography speaks a lot about the dramatic history of the German minority in Romania during the XX-th century. Her father served in Waffen SS during WW II, her mother was deported to a labor camp in the Soviet Union.

Herta studied German and Romanian literature at the University in Timisoara and began to work as a technical translator in an engineering company. She was laid out for refusing to collaborate with the secret police. Then she made a living by teaching in a kindergarden and giving private lessons of German. She started to write: her first novel was published in then Communist Romania in a censored version. Eventually she emigrated to Germany. She is now living in Berlin.

The Nobel Prize comes to reward an author who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed (Wikipedia).


(German and Nordic Literature)