14 DAY TRIAL // The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided: this year's Nobel Prize for Literature goes to Herta Muller, a prolific novelist, poet and essayist that is mostly renowned for her depictions of the harsh conditions present in Romania during the rule of the Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu. She was born in the Eastern European country, but moved to Germany, as all her work was being censored by the political regime. She received numerous awards over her career, and the Nobel Prize is undoubtedly the crown jewel in her collection.
Muller was born in Timis County, Romania, and had a rough childhood. Her father, a part of the German minority in the country, had served in the Waffen SS, and her mother was deported to the Soviet Union because of it. She studied German and Romanian literature at the Timisoara University. In 1976, she entered an opened conflict with the Securitate, the secret state police, after refusing to sign an agreement with the institution. Eventually, she fled the country with her husband, novelist Richard Wagner, in 1987, and started writing from Germany.
She has been a member of the German Academy for Writing and Poetry since 1995, and was also rewarded the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1998, for her novel, The Land of Green Plums. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences mentions that the Prize was given to Muller “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” Overall, Herta Muller has over 25 important awards, accumulated in nearly three decades of writing.
The Nobel Prizes for this year have been announced in all but one category. In Physics, optical research was the main theme this year. The person who advanced fiber-optics knowledge the most received half of the award, with the two experts that invented the CCD sensor meriting a quarter of the Prize each. In Medicine, the award went to chromosome research, while, in Chemistry, ribosome studies received the highest-prized award in the scientific community. The fifth and final category, the Prize for Peace, still remains to be announced.