STOCKHOLM - Romanian-born Herta Mueller of Germany has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy announced in Stockholm 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).
Mueller’s parents belonged to the German-speaking minority in Romania. Her father served with the Waffen SS during World War II. Her mother was deported in 1945, a fate she shared with many others from the same minority group, and spent five years in what is today Ukraine, the Academy said.
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.
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 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 prizes for economics Monday.
The award ceremony is slated Dec 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death. Nobel, inventor of dynamite, endowed the awards.
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October 8th, 2009 at 10:34 am
Okay, here’s an admission: Yet another recent Nobel laureate whom I’ve never even heard of, and this confession coming from one who has considered himself very well-read and pretty well versed in literature. This is not to diminish Ms. Muller’s achievement, and I congratulate her. I just wonder if, as an American and English-speaker only, I’m somehow missing out on a lot of erstwhile magnificent literature because it isn’t translated into my mother tongue, and if this is so, why? Are we so overwhelmed by the Dan Browns and Stephanie Meyers and Oprah’s choices that a world of great literature is being eclipsed here by the shadow of towering blockbusters?