Tue, Feb 09 2010

Nobel Prize for Herta Müller - chronicler of life under Ceausescu

Thu, Oct 08 2009 14:41 CET 4047 Views 2 Comments
Nobel Prize for Herta Müller - chronicler of life under Ceausescu

Peter Englund (right), permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, arrives to announce that Herta Muller of Germany is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2009 in Stockholm, October 8, 2009.

Nobel Prize for Herta Müller - chronicler of life under Ceausescu

German novelist Herta Müller has won this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. Müller, 56, was born in Romania and is famous for her works depicting life under dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

Announcing the award, the Swedish academy hailed Müller as a writer who "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed".

In 1976 Müller began working as a translator for an engineering company, but was dismissed in 1979 for her refusal to cooperate with the Securitate, the communist regime's secret police.

Initially, she made a living by teaching kindergarten and giving private German lessons. Her first book was published in Romania (in German) in 1982, and appeared only in a censored version, as with most publications of the time.

Müller becomes only the 12th woman to have won the Nobel since it was launched in 1901. Worth 10 million Swedish kronor (893 000 pounds sterling), the Nobel is awarded to "the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction", as described in Alfred Nobel's will of 1895.

Müller now lives in Berlin where she has received many literary honours, including Germany's most prestigious, the Kleist prize, the Frankz Kafka and the 100,000 euro (85 000 pounds sterling) Impac award for her novel The Land of Green Plums. Müller said that she wrote the novel, which centres around the lives of five young Romanians during the Ceausescu era, "in memory of my Romanian friends who were killed under the Ceausescu regime".

Comments

Anonymous Madeline Fri, Oct 16 2009 18:18 CET
Inappropriate comment?

Stefcho: they didn't give "this award" to President Obama, they gave him the Peace Prize. If you're going to criticize, get your facts straight. I agree he doesn't deserve it compared to other people who have won the prize (Mandela, etc.), but your rationale for why ("the guy that is fighting 2 wars around the world") is ludicrous. He didn't start these ridiculous wars (we have the far right of two societies to thank for that) but he is trying to end them in a responsible manner.

We (my friends and I) do want Obama for a second term and are amazed at how much he has done to fix the mess left by the free market robber barons of the 80s and 90s.

You're clearly afraid of "socialism," but either you don't understand it or don't understand the American left, and therefore erroneously equate it with socialism/communism. Or perhaps you prefer the cruelty inflicted by unrestrained capitalism.

Anonymous Stefcho Fri, Oct 09 2009 12:35 CET
Inappropriate comment?

After all this person has been throught they turn around and give this award to Obama. the guy that is fighting 2 wars around the world. I think it was meant to be an insult to Obama and his turning American into a European socialist country, we don't want him for a second term and we are also scared what he'll do in the short years he has left.

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