Herta Muller

Herta Muller is a Romanian-German novelist, poet and essayist, born in 1953 in Nitchidorf, in the Banat region of Romania, part of that region's ethnic-German minority. She won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, recognized by the Swedish Academy for work that, "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed." Her fiction and essays draw directly on her own experience of surveillance, harassment and eventual emigration under the repressive regime of Nicolae Ceausescu in Communist Romania, depicting violence, cruelty and fear with a spare, image-dense prose style shaped by that history.