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Muller was "surprised." (AP Photo/Gero Breloer)
While U.S. President Barack Obama received the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Oct. 9, Herta Muller, a Romanian-born German poet and prose writer, received the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature on Oct. 8. She is only the 12th woman to win the prize in the last 109 years.
Americans are likely to be suprised by the selection as they have been in years past. Very few of Muller's works have been translated into English, but she is one of Germany's most heralded writers with The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment. Like much of her life, which has been steeped in political turmoil, her prose and poetry "depicts the landscape of the dispossessed," according to the Swedish Academy.
Her father served for the Nazi party's Waffen SS combat troups and her mother spent five years in a Soviet work camp following World War II. As one of the remaining German-speaking Romanians in her homeland, Muller spoke up for freedom of speech under Ceausescu's reign.
She began writing fiction in the early 1980s and her first book was titled Niederungen, later published in English as Nadirs, which is considered her most personal work. The book centers on the scars of communism, but also deals with very personal dramas from her family and its past.
Approximately four to five of her books have been translated in English, with the help of a variety of translators--Michael Hofmann, Martin Chalmers, Philip Boehm, Michael Hulse, Valetina Glajar and André Lefevere--according to Center for Literary Translation at Columbia Executive Director Esther Allen from a recent entry at Three Percent.
According to a recent Time article, Muller told the press that she is not too focused on a single subject-totalitarianism. "The most overwhelming experience for me was living under the dictatorial regime in Romania. And simply living in Germany, hundreds of kilometers away, does not erase my past experience. I packed up my past when I left, and remember that dictatorships are still a current topic in Germany," she said.
Officially, Muller will not receive the Nobel Prize in Literature until the ceremonies in December.
For additional articles on Muller, check out some excerpts of her work at The New York Times, Forbes' article on Muller and other female winners, information about her first book, Nadirs, to be translated in English at Lincoln Journal Star.
Comments
Finally ,Congratulations Miss Herta.
Fabulous article, I was going to work on an article for her, but yours can't be beat! Good job!
It is terrific that Herta Muller is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1998, Herta Muller won the International IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award for her sparse, dark novel, THE LAND OF GREEN PLUMS. Another Nobel Laureate, Orhan Pamuk, won the IMPAC-Dublin award, in 2003, before he won the Nobel Prize in 2006. There are too few books by Herta Muller translated into English. Fortunately,THE LAND OF GREEN PLUMS
is one of four books available. In our time, when non-fiction writing is often fictitious,Herta Muller's fiction is almost too much truth.
Thanks for this article. I must check out her work.
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