Herta Müller

Herta Müller grew up in Nițchidorf, a German-speaking village of Banat Swabian farmers in western Romania. The century’s damage ran through her family: her father had served in the Waffen-SS, and in 1945 her mother, then seventeen, was deported with tens of thousands of ethnic Germans to Soviet labour camps, returning only in 1950. German was the language of home; Romanian came later, at school. She studied German and Romanian literature in Timișoara, and in 1979 lost her job as a translator at an engineering factory after refusing to cooperate with the Securitate.

Her first book, the story collection Nadirs, appeared in Bucharest in 1982 only in censored form, its unsentimental picture of village life resented both by the regime and by her own community. Harassment continued until 1987, when she and her then-husband, the novelist Richard Wagner, were allowed to leave for West Germany; they settled in West Berlin. In novels such as The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment she examines how a dictatorship reaches into the most private places — friendship, love, the objects on a kitchen table. Her sentences are short and hard-edged, built from images that slip their ordinary meanings, as if language itself were being watched.

The Hunger Angel, published in 2009, returned to the deportation of Romania’s Germans, drawing on the recollections of the poet Oskar Pastior and on her mother’s experience. That October the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize, praising a writing that joins poetic concentration to the candour of prose. Alongside fiction she has made collage poems from words cut out of newspapers and magazines, and has remained an outspoken critic of authoritarian rule, treating memory less as a subject than as a duty.