Herta Muller, a German writer born in 1953 in a village in Western Romania, has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The jury argued its option with the ""concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose" in Muller's work, which "depicts the landscape of the dispossessed". Muller, a representative of the German ethnic minority in Romania who migrated to Germany in 1987, is currently living in Berlin.
Her works have been translated in over 20 languages and she has received many internatonal awards including the Impac Dublin Literary Award, Kleist, Franz Kafka and the Literary Award of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation..
Her name has been figuring among the potential winners of the Nobel Prize almost yearly since 1999.
Other writers given real chances to win the Nobel for Literature this year included Israeli Amos Oz, US writers Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood and Algerian writer Assia Djebar.
Winners of the Nobel prize for Literature 1995-2009:
2009: Herta Müller (Germany
2008: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio (Franta)
2007: Doris Lessing (UK)
2006: Orhan Pamuk (Turkey)
2005: Harold Pinter (UK)
2004: Elfriede Jelinek (Austria)
2003: J.M. Coetzee (South Africa)
2002: Imre Kertesz (Hungary)
2001: V.S. Naipaul (UK)
2000: Gao Xingjian (France)
1999: Gunter Grass (Germany)
1998: Jose Saramago (Portugal)
1997: Dario Fo (Italy)
1996: Wislawa Szymborska (Poland)
1995: Seamus Heaney (Ireland)
