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".