Herta Müller

The 2009 Nobel prize has been awarded to Herta Müller, for depicting the 'landscape of the dispossessed' with 'the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose'
Herta Müller (born 17 August 1953) is a Romanian-born German Nobel Prize-winning novelist, poet and essayist noted for her works depicting the effects of violence, cruelty and terror, usually in the setting of Communist Romania under the repressive Nicolae Ceauşescu regime which she experienced herself. Many of her works are told from the viewpoint of the German minority in Romania and are also a depiction of the modern history of the Germans in the Banat, and more broadly, Transylvania. Her much acclaimed 2009 novel Everything I Possess I Carry With Me portrays the deportation of Romania's German minority to Stalinist Soviet Gulags during the Soviet occupation of Romania for use as German forced labor.

Müller has been an internationally well-known author since the early 1990s, and her works have been translated into more than 20 languages. She has received over 20 awards, including the 1994 Kleist Prize, the 1995 Aristeion Prize, the 1998 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the 2009 Franz Werfel Human Rights Award. On 8 October 2009 it was announced that she had been awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Everything I Possess I Carry With Me (German: Atemschaukel) is a novel by German Nobel Prize-winning author Herta Müller, published in 2009 by Carl Hanser Verlag. It is a depiction of the persecution of ethnic Germans in Romania by the Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union, and deals with the deportation of Romanian Germans to Gulag camps by Soviet occupying forces during and after 1945. The novel tells the story of a youth from Hermannstadt (Sibiu) in Siebenbürgen (Transylvania), Leo Auberg, who is deported at the age of 17 to a Soviet forced labor concentration camp in Nowo-Gorlowka (Novogorlovka, Ukraine, now incorporated in Gorlovka) and spends five years of his life there. It is inspired by the experiences of poet Oskar Pastior and other survivors, including the mother of the author. Initially, Pastior and Müller had planned to write a book about his experiences together, however, Pastior died in 2006.


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