Herta Mueller Wins Nobel Prize In Literature

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded this morning to Herta Müller, a Romanian-born German poet and novelist, "who," stated the Swedish Academy, "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed." She will receive a 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) prize.

Müller has struggled with censorship for much of her career. Starting out in Romania under the Communist Ceausescu regime, her books came under harsh criticism from her own government, although, said the Academy,

[O]utside of Romania, the German press received them very positively. Because Mueller had publicly criticized the dictatorship in Romania, she was prohibited from publishing in her own country.

In 1987, she emigrated to Germany, where she enjoyed great success. From The Guardian:

[S]he has been the recipient of a multitude of literary awards, including Germany's most prestigious, the Kleist prize, the Frankz Kafka and the 100,000 euro Impac award for her novel The Land of Green Plums. The story of five young Romanians living under Ceausescu's dictatorship, Müller has said that she wrote it "in memory of my Romanian friends who were killed under the Ceausescu regime", and that she "felt it was my duty". The New York Times called it "a novel of graphically observed detail in which the author seeks to create a sort of poetry out of the spiritual and material ugliness of life in Communist Romania".

Most of Müller's works are published exclusively in German, but English translations exist for The Passport (1989), Traveling on One Leg (1992), The Land of Green Plums (1996), and The Appointment (2001).

Müller is one of 12 women to have ever been awarded the prize; the last female recipient was Doris Lessing in 2007.

Last year's winner was French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. Each year, the prize is chosen by the Swedish Academy, which currently has 15 active members. The nomination and selection process is shrouded in secrecy; the shortlists are officially kept hidden for 50 years after the winner is chosen. The committee even goes so far as to use code names for the nominees, such as "Harry Potter" for Harold Pinter.

Despite the gravity that the Academy clearly seems to bestow upon the award, an article from Newsweek suggests that the Nobel Prize in Literature doesn't actually matter very much. While the article allows that the money is not insignificant, and that there are other benefits such as protection from a persecuting government as well a lifetime publication guarantee, it draws attention to the case of last year's winner:

...[I]f you think the prize guarantees you legions of new fans, think again. It may, and then again, you may wind up like last year's winner, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, who enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame and then fell off the radar.

For this little-known German writer, however, a little bit of fame couldn't hurt.

Comments

[MosheDayanHero]

10:35 AM on 10/11/2009

A literary nobody gets a literature prize. Yet again....

[brettrobbins]

04:05 AM on 10/11/2009

Guess not. This process feels kind of mechanical...

[brettrobbins]

04:01 AM on 10/11/2009

Dear Huffpost, could you PLEASE delete the stand-alone paragraph at the end of my post (i.e., "You say this because..."). I promise to be more careful to edit my responses in the future. I've been blogging awhile and am usually careful but this one escaped my notice somehow...

[brettrobbins]

03:54 AM on 10/11/2009

"Despite the gravity that the Academy clearly seems to bestow upon the award, an article from Newsweek suggests that the Nobel Prize in Literature doesn't actually matter very much." All that the article excerpt you quote indicates is that the Nobel Prize doesn't necessarily guarantee increased popularity. It's YOU who go a step further and imply that the gauge for whether or not the Nobel Prize in Literature matters is how popular the author happens to be. I vehemently disagree. The Nobel Committee isn't the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose choice for, say, Best Motion Picture in a given year does in fact tend to reflect, at least to some degree, box-office success. The Nobel Committee, on the other hand, has a long (and, I assume, proud) tradition of bestowing their Prize on authors primarily if not exclusively for the intrinsic value of their work (admittedly a highly subjective judgment call) rather than for how many volumes they happen to have sold (and might sell in the future because of the award) in bookstores. To perpetuate the notion that the Nobel Prize for Literature is valuable to an author only if it increases their popularity is to misunderstand the well-established quality-over-quantity ethos of the Nobel Committee.

You say this because the article implies that popularity is the primary if not exclusive criterion of whether or not the Nobel Prize is significant.

[cheryle4art]

12:24 PM on 10/08/2009

Although women have come a long way in art and literature it amazes me how far we have yet to journey to get the recognition that too many men already take for granted in countries that are free from political oppression such as the United States.

[JScott]

11:38 AM on 10/08/2009

Let Herta put you in the driver's seat.......today (thank you Hertz RAC)