Herta Mueller wins 2009 Nobel prize for literature (Roundup)

Oct 8, 2009, 12:52 GMT

Stockholm - Romanian-born Herta Mueller of Germany, who has written about her experience as member of a minority and living under a dicatorship, won this year's Nobel prize for literature, the Swedish Academy announced in Stockholm on Thursday.

The Academy's citation said that 'with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, (she) depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.'

The prize is worth 10 million kronor (1.4 million dollars).

Mueller's initial reaction was surprise and she said she had not reckoned to be in the running, she told the German Press Agency dpa.

She was the 12th woman to be awarded the Nobel literature prize since 1901. Recent female winners were Doris Lessing in 2007 and Austria's Elfriede Jelinek in 2004.

Mueller's family belonged to the German-speaking minority in north-western Romania. Her father served with the Waffen SS during World War II. After Romania fell under communist influence, her mother was deported by the Soviets in 1945, a fate she shared with many others from the same ethnic-German minority group, and spent five years in a labour camp in what is today Ukraine.

Academy Permanent Secretary Peter Englund told Swedish radio news that she has a 'fantastic language, very distinctive.'

He also mentioned her skill at composition and 'short sentences with lots of images.'

'Her language is extremely precise,' added Englund, who earlier this year took over the position.

Englund said Mueller had 'a lot to say' and described 'not only daily life in a dictatorship, but also to be outside a majority language... and outside your own family.'

Mueller experienced at first hand the dreaded Romanian secret police Securitate when she worked in the late 1970s as a translator at a machine factory and refused to work as an informant.

She left Romania for Germany in 1987 with her husband, Richard Wagner, and settled in (West) Berlin.

Two years later the Romanian communist regime collapsed, and long- serving dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was deposed and summarily executed.

Readers interested in her writing could well start with her 1997 novel, The Appointment, Englund said.

Mueller, 56, made her debut in 1982 wih the short story collection, Niederungen. Earlier this year she published Atemschaukel (that has the English working title 'Everything I Own I Carry with Me') that depicts the exile of German Romanians.

She was born in the German-speaking town of Nitzkydorf, Romania. Four of her works have been translated into English.

The literature prize was the fourth of this year's Nobel Prizes. The prizes for medicine, physics and chemistry were announced earlier.

The Nobel for peace is to be announced Friday, followed by the prize for economics on Monday.

The award ceremony is on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death. Nobel, inventor of dynamite, endowed the awards.