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Herta Müller
Herta Müller was born on 17 August 1953 in Nitzkydorf (Banat/Romania). Her parents belonged to the German-speaking minority. Her father was a lorry driver, her mother a peasant. She attended school and university in Temeswar. After refusing to work for the Romanian secret service, the Securitate, she lost her job as translator in a machine factory. Nadirs, her first book, lay around at the publishers for four years and was heavily censored when it was eventually published. The manuscript was smuggled to Germany and published in 1984. In 1987, she emigrated to Germany and has lived in Berlin ever since. She has a string of literary prizes to her name, including the Aspekte Literature Prize (1984), the Kleist Prize (1994), the Prix Aristeion (1995), the Konrad Adenauer prize for literature (2004) and, the Nobel Prize for Literature (2009). 'Every object must occupy the place it occupies and I must be the person I am' was written as an afterword to Max Blecher's Adventures in Immediate Irreality, forthcoming from New Directions on 17 February 2015.

Articles Available Online


'Every object must occupy ...'

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January 2015

Herta Müller

TR. Philip Boehm

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January 2015

I’d like to introduce you to a book, an impressive book that no one read when it first came out in Romania in 1936...

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October 2012

Pressed Up Against the Immediate

Rye Dag Holmboe

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October 2012

The author Philip Pullman recently criticised the overuse of the present tense in contemporary literature, a criticism he stretched...

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June 2014

Writing What You Know

Simon Hammond

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June 2014

In the summer of 1959, a headstrong but lovesick English graduate took a trip to the hometown of his...

poetry

September 2011

First Blimp

Joshua Trotter

poetry

September 2011

Removing colour from my thoughts, I formed a winter ball. I threw it. The dead were uncounted. There was...

 

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