Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature (2009) and Germany’s most prestigious literary award, the Kleist Prize (1994), Herta Müller was born to a German family in Romania in 1953. After refusing to cooperate with Ceaușescu’s Securitate, she lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats before she was able to emigrate to Germany in 1987. She is the author of several other books, including The Land of Green Plums, winner of the 1998 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.