Herta MüllerFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, searchThe title of this article contains the character ü. Where it is unavailable or not desired, the name may be represented as Herta Mueller.Herta MüllerHerta Müller in 2007Born17 August 1953 (1953-08-17) (age 56)Ni�0�0chidorf, Timi�0�6 County, RomaniaOccupationWriterNationalityGerman, RomanianPeriodlate 20th–early 21st centuryNotable work(s)The Land of Green Plums, Everything I Possess I Carry With MeNotable award(s)Nobel Prize in Literature2009Spouse(s)Richard WagnerInfluences[show]Richard Wagner (novelist), Romanian literature, German literature [1] 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 Ceau�0�6escu 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.[2][3] 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. Müller was born in Ni�0�0chidorf (German: Nitzkydorf), up to the 1980s a German-speaking village in the Romanian Banat in western Romania. The daughter of Banat Swabian farmers, her family was part of Romania's German minority. Her grandfather had been a wealthy farmer and merchant, but his property was confiscated by the communist regime. Her father had been a member of the Waffen SS during World War II, and earned a living as a truck driver in Communist Romania[4]. In 1945 her mother, then aged 17, was along with 100,000 others of the German minority deported to forced labor camps in the Soviet Union, from which she was released in 1950.[5][4][6][7] Her native language is German; only in grammar school did she learn Romanian.[8] She was a student of German studies and Romanian literature at the Timi�0�6oara University.In 1976, Müller began working as a translator for an engineering factory, but was dismissed in 1979 for her refusal to cooperate with the Securitate, the Communist regime's secret police. After her dismissal she initially earned a living by teaching kindergarten and giving private German lessons.