Herta Müller

is a Romanian novelist writing in German. Criticial of the Ceausescu regime, she was obliged to work as a translator in a machine factory, a post from which she was fired in 1979 after refusing to cooperate with the Securitate. She subsequently established close ties with the underground literary circle “Aktionsgruppe Banat”. In 1987 she emigrated to West Germany. Her works, which deal with the experience of political repression, include Atemschaukel (2009); Der König verneigt sich und tötet (2003); her first novel Niederungen (published in uncensored form in West Germany in 1984); and her most recent novel Immer derselbe Schnee und immer derselbe Onkel (2011). Herta Müller won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.