German novelist, Herta Muller has become the 12th woman in 108 years to win the Nobel Prize for literature. She was praised by the Nobel judges for depicting the landscape of the dispossessed with the concentration of poetry and frankness of prose. Muller constantly returns to the oppression, dictatorship, and exile of her own life in her novels, essays, and poems. Worth 10 million Swedish kronor the Nobel is awarded to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”, as described in Alfred Nobel’s will of 1895.
According to the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Peter Englund, Muller had the capacity of really giving you the sense of what it was to live in a dictatorship, to be as a minority in another country and to live in exile. Muller has a very fine tuned precision in her language.
Born in Romania in 1953, Muller rejected to work together with Ceausescu’s Securitate, lost her job as a teacher, and was a subject of repeated threats until she emigrated in 1987. She now lives in Berlin, where she has received a multitude of literary awards, including Germany’s most prestigious, the Kleist prize, the Frankz Kafka, and the 100,000 Euro Impac award for Hertzier.