Herta Mueller wins 2009 Nobel literature prize
AP - Donnerstag, 8. Oktober 2009 16:30:58 By MATT MOORE and KARL RITTER
Mueller was honored for work that "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed," the Swedish Academy said.
The decision was expected to keep alive the controversy surrounding the academy's pattern of awarding the prize to European writers.
"If you are European (it is) easier to relate to European literature," Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, told The Associated Press. "It's the result of psychological bias that we really try to be aware of. It's not the result of any program."
Mueller, 56, made her debut in 1982 with a collection of short stories titled "Niederungen," or "Nadirs," depicting the harshness of life in a small, German-speaking village in Romania. It was promptly censored by the communist government.
In 1984 an uncensored version was smuggled to Germany, where it was published and devoured by readers. That work was followed by "Oppressive Tango" in Romania but she was eventually prohibited from publishing inside her country for her criticism of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's rule and its feared secret police, the Securitate.
"The Romanian national press was very critical of these works while, outside of Romania, the German press received them very positively," the Academy said.
Mueller, whose father served in the Waffen SS during World War II, is the third European to win the prize in a row and the 10th German, joining Guenter Grass in 1999 and Heinrich Boell in 1972.
"I think that there is an incredible force in what she writes, she has a very, very unique style," Englund said. "You read half the page and you know at once that it's Herta Mueller."
"At the same time she has something to tell, partly from her own background as a persecuted dissident in Romania, but also her own background as a stranger in her own country, a stranger to the political regime, a stranger to the majority language, and a stranger to her own family," he added.
Mueller emigrated to Germany with her husband in 1987, two years before Ceausescu was toppled from power amid the widening communist collapse across eastern Europe.
"She is a very sincere writer and wrote about what happened to her and this is something that must have impressed the judges," said Romanian actor Ion Caramitru, an anti-communist who rode atop a tank to the television station in Bucharest during the 1989 revolt and now heads the country's national theater.
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