News updates about STOCKHOLM:German author Herta Mueller won the 2009 Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday for her work inspired by her life under Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship in Romania.The Nobel jury hailed Mueller, 56, as a writer who “with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.”
Mueller was born in a German-speaking region of Romania and fled the country two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. She has been a longstanding candidate for the award which comes just ahead of the 20th anniversary of the collapse of communism.
The grim daily life under Ceausescu’s oppressive regime and the harsh treatment of Romanian Germans has featured strongly in her works. Corruption, intolerance and repression are also major themes in her writing.
Mueller was born on August 17, 1953 in western Romania in 1953 to parents of the German-speaking minority. Her father was in the Nazi SS during the Second World War and the Romanian communists deported her mother to a labour camp in Soviet Ukraine after the war.
Mueller was sacked from her first job as a translator in the 1970s after refusing to work for Ceausescu’s hated Securitate secret police.
She then devoted her life to literature. Her first collection of short stories, “Niederungen”, in 1982 — published as “Nadirs” in English -- was censored by the Romanian regime and only published in full two years later in Germany after being smuggled out.read more
