Herta Muller Wins Nobel Prize

The Swedish Academy announced this morning that Romanian-born German writer Herta Muller has won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. She is the twelfth woman to win the award.

Herta Muller (also spelled "Mueller") was born in 1953. Her father was in the Waffen SS during World War II and her mother spent five years in a Soviet labor camp after the war. The German-speaking minority was subjected to persecution in Romania in the postwar years, and especially after Nicolae Ceausescu came to power in 1965. From the beginning of her career in the early 1980s, Muller made the repressive reality of life under Ceausescu a prominent subject of her writing, and most of her books were banned in Romania, though celebrated in Germany and elsewhere. She emigrated to Germany in 1987.

Of the nineteen books Muller has written to date four have been translated into English: The Passport, The Land of Green Plums, Traveling on One Leg and The Appointment. All but the first have been published in this country but have quickly gone out of stock as a result of today's announcement. Feel free to check with Accent on Books for future availability.

More information can be found at the Nobel website.