Herta Müller

Born in 1953 in Nițchidorf, a village in Romania's German-speaking Banat, Müller grew up inside the very regime she would later dissect on the page. Her novels and essays map the violence and paranoia of Ceaușescu's Romania, often through the eyes of its German minority — people caught between dictatorships, belonging nowhere fully. By the early 1990s her work had found an international audience, translated into more than twenty languages. Her 2009 novel "The Hunger Angel" traced the deportation of Romania's Germans to Soviet labor camps, a chapter of postwar Europe often unwritten. That same…