German · b. 1953
Herta Müller won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature for writing that "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed." The German author—born in Romania's German-speaking minority—writes about totalitarianism's invasion of private life with compressed, lyric intensity. "The Hunger Angel" reimagined the Soviet labor camps. Müller's work preserves memory against systems designed to erase it.