Herta Mueller, a novelist and poet who wrote about harsh life behind the Iron Curtain, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature Thursday. The choice of Mueller, who is little known in the United States and in many other parts of the world, stoked recent criticism that the Nobel committee favors European writers.Mueller, an ethnic German born in Romania, was censored and harassed for her depictions of life under the Romanian communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. The Nobel judges praised Mueller, "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed."
The writer, who lives in Berlin, is the third European in a row to win the $1.4 million prize. It is has been 15 years since an American won the Nobel for literature; in 1993 it was given to Toni Morrison.
"I am very surprised and still cannot believe it," Mueller said in a statement released by her publisher in Germany. "I can't say anything more at the moment."
Mueller's collection of short stories, "Niederungen," or "Nadirs," was smuggled in the 1980s from Romania to Germany where it won acclaim. After her book "Oppressive Tango," about corruption and oppressive life in the communist country, the Ceausescu government prohibited her from publishing. Police harassed her, and she was forced out of her job as a translator.
Those who have read her work describe it as powerful, and in her hometown in Romania, Nitzkydorf, she was heralded Thursday.
"From now, I can say our village does exist on the map," Mayor Ioan Mascovescu told Romanian television.
Some had thought an American might finally win the award, with Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates frequently mentioned, especially after the backlash caused when the head of the Nobel jury last year disparaged American literature.
"Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world . . . not the United States," Horace Engdahl told the Associated Press in 2008 when he was permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which picks the Nobel Prize winner for literature. "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. . . . They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature."
This year, Peter Englund, Engdahl's successor, told AP: "If you are European [it is] easier to relate to European literature. . . . It's the result of psychological bias that we really try to be aware of. It's not the result of any program."
Mueller's last novel, "Atemschaukel," or "Swinging Breath," has been nominated for this year's German Book Prize. The winner is scheduled to be announced Monday.
The bulk of her work is read in German, but some works have been translated into English, French and Spanish, including "The Land of Green Plums," "Traveling on One Leg" and "The Appointment."
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