The 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Herta Müller, “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.”
A native of Romania, Müller was one of many who opposed the oppressive Ceauşescu regime, and much of her work reflects the theme of living under a dictatorship. After Ceauşescu was overthrown in 1989, the Romanian secret police, Securitate, was supposedly abolished. However, twenty years later, Müller remains a Securitate target, an experience she wrote about just this past July in this fascinating article.