Herta Müller
Herta Muller is a Romanian-German novelist, poet and essayist who received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was born in Nitchidorf, in Timis County in Romania, to a German-speaking minority family, and writes in German while thinking in two languages. Her books return to life under Ceausescu's dictatorship: surveillance, informers, factory work, the pressure of a state that reads your mail. The prose is compressed and strange, built from concrete images rather than argument. She has been internationally established since the early 1990s and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages.
TV (1)
Books (18)
- Zgodbe iz Nemčije (2021)
- Essais choisis (2019)
- The Hunger Angel (2012)
- The Land of Green Plums (2010)
- Atemschaukel (2009)
- The appointment (2002)
- Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet (1997)
- Hunger und Seide (1995)
- Herztier (1994)
- Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger (1992)
- Reisende auf einem Bein (1989)
- Barfüssiger Februar (1987)
- Der Mensch ist ein grosser Fasan auf der Welt (1986)
- Fox Was Ever the Hunter
- Hunger Angel
- Tot el que tinc, ho duc al damunt
- Niederungen
- The Appointment
Where to start with Herta Müller
Start with The Land of Green Plums, the most direct account of what a police state does to a group of friends, and the book most readers finish. The appointment is tighter and harder, a single tram ride to an interrogation. The Hunger Angel moves to a Soviet labour camp and is the most beautiful and least comfortable of the three. German readers should go to Herztier and Atemschaukel, which are the same two novels in her own language.