Nobel Prize Literature

Like many of the Nobel Laureates, Herta Müller is known for writing with a political bent. The 12th woman to win the prize, Müller, 56, is a Romanian-born author who emigrated to Germany from the then-communist country in 1987. The Romanian government censored her first book, a collection of short stories published in 1982 and titled Niederungen, or Lowlands, depicting life in a German-speaking Romanian village. The Nobel Prize committee honored her for writing that "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed."