Berlin - Herta Mueller, 56, the winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature, gained fame as a poet and novelist after leaving behind communist repression in her native Romania and settling in Berlin. Many of her novels and poems focus on day-to-day life under a dictatorship, which is all she knew in her early years. Mueller was born in a German-speaking village, Nitzkydorf, in 1953 in a part of Romania, the Banat, where German speakers still live.
She attended university, studying German and Romanian, in the nearby city of Timisoara and initially worked as a salaried translator and in schools. Life under communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was an education in fear.
She lost her job when she refused to become an informer for the sinister Romanian secret service, the Securitate.
Her first book, Niederungen, appeared in 1982 in Romania in a censored version and in 1984 in full from a German publisher.
Mueller continued to face interrogations, searches of her home and other persecution till she and her husband at the time, Richard Wagner, applied to emigrate to the West and were accepted.
They settled in West Berlin in 1987. Romanian communism collapsed in 1989, but by that time, Mueller had begun to accept a series of academic posts at German, Swiss, British and US universities, and Berlin has been her home base ever since.
For a decade, German literary critics have been suggesting that Mueller is the country's top contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. This year, the Swedish Academy agreed.
She is a member of the German Academy of Literature, one of many honours she has received down the years for her writing.
Publishers say her work has appeared in more than 20 languages. Titles in English translation include The Appointment and The Land of Green Plums, although a considerable part of her work has still to appear in English.
Mueller recently finished editing a semi-biographical novel, Atemschaukel, based on the experiences of a fellow ethnic German Romanian, Oskar Pastior, who died in 2006.
Pastior was a survivor of Soviet labour camps and Mueller assisted him to write up his remarkable story while he was still alive.
The book that she made out of his story, entitled Atemschaukel in Germany, with the English working title "Everything I Own I Carry with Me," is one of six finalists for next week's German Book Award for this year's best novel in German.
