Herta Müller

Herta Müller, born on August 17, 1953, to a German-speaking family of farmers in Nitchidorf, Romania, has for years explored questions of national and ethnic identity, language, totalitarianism, and dispossession in her work. In 1982, a heavily censored version of her debut short story collection, Nadirs, was published, followed in 1986 by her first novel, The Passport. In 1987, she went into exile in Germany, where she would go on to publish more novels, including 1994’s The Land of Green Plums (translated into English by Michael Hofmann), 1997’s The Appointment, and 2009’s The Hunger Angel (inspired by the experiences of the poet Oskar Pastior and other Romanians in the forced labor camps under Stalin). Müller lives in Berlin and was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature

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