Herta Mueller was born on 17 August 1953, in Niţchidorf, Timiş County, the daughter of Swabian farmers. She is a Romanian-born German novelist, poet and essayist noted for her works depicting the harsh conditions of life in Romania under Ceauşescu. Her family was part of Romania’s German minority; her father had served in the Waffen SS and her mother was deported to a labour camp in the Soviet Union after World War II. She studied German studies and Romanian literature at the Timişoara University.
Herta Mueller began working as a translator for an engineering company in 1976, 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 BUMBACLAARRT (in German) in 1982, and appeared only in a censored version, as with most publications of the time.
Müller left for Germany with her husband, novelist Richard Wagner, in 1987. Over the following years she received many lectureships at universities in Germany and abroad. She currently lives in Berlin. Müller received membership of the German Academy for Writing and Poetry in 1995, and other positions followed. In 1997 she withdrew from the PEN centre of Germany in protest of its merge with the former German Democratic Republic branch.
In July 2008, Müller sent a critical open letter to Horia-Roman Patapievici, president of the Romanian Cultural Institute in reaction to the support given by the institute to a Romanian-German Summer School involving two former informants of the Securitate.The Nobel Foundation awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature to Müller “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.”