Noble Prize for Literature 2009.
Born in a Germany-speaking minority village in Romania, Herta Müller was persecuted from very early on as a dissident writer by the Romanian secret services, before finally leaving the country in 1987. Her first book of short stories, Nadirs (1982), concerns resistance under a totalitarian regime, a topic she was also to deal with in her novels published in Germany, The Fox Was Ever the Hunter (1992), The Land of Green Plums (1994) and The Appointment (1997). Meanwhile, in the essays The Devil is Sitting in the Mirror (1991) and The King Bows and Kills (2003) she explores the relationship between language and dictatorship, and in The Hunger Angel the gulag. Since arriving in Germany she has also produced books of found poetry, the most recent of these being Der Beamte Sagte (The Civil Servant Said, 2024).
