Herta Müller: Nobel Prize 2009
"who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed".
In 2009, Herta Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for works that combine “the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicting the landscape of the dispossessed”.
Born in 1953 in Niţchidorf, a German-speaking village in western Romania, Müller studied German and Romanian literature at the University of Timişoara, then joined the Aktionsgruppe Bannat, an alliance of Romanian and German authors in Transylvania dedicated to seeking freedom of expression under the Ceauceşcu dictatorship.
“Lately I’m being summoned more and more often: ten sharp on Tuesday, ten sharp on Saturday, on Wednesday, Monday. As if years were a week, I’m amazed that winter comes so close on the heels of summer.”
Refusing to co-operate with Ceauseşcu’s Securitate while working as a translator in a machine factory, she lost her job and suffered repeated threats before leaving for Germany in 1987.
“Müller’s language is the purest poetry—every sentence is a poem or a painting.”
Her work includes: Nadirs, The Passport, The Land of Green Plums, Traveling on One Leg, The Appointment, and Everything I Possess I Carry With Me.
Herta Müller lives in Berlin.
Related Articles
Texts: Every Word Knows Something of a Vicious Circle (Nobel Lecture) | Securitate in all but Name (Article published in Die Zeit) | The Land of Green Plums
Reviews: Strangers in a Strange Land | Betrayal as a Way of Life | An Eye on Absurdity
Video: About Dictatroship (PWF 2004) | Receiving (the Nobel Prize)
