by Nina Wachenfeld
When the native Romanian received the award in Oslo in October 2009, becoming the twelfth female Nobel laureate in Literature, tribute was paid not only to a superb author, but also to a passionate human rights activist who, in her works, describes the terrors of the Ceauscescu regime. Best known since the early 1990s, her works have been translated into more than 20 languages, and the fictional style of the award-winning author from the former German-Romanian region of Banat has often been compared to Franz Kafka. Herta Müller, whose mother disappeared for many years into Russian labor camps, and whose father was conscripted into the Waffen SS, was a member of an activist group which advocated freedom of speech and a ban on censorship. After initially being refused permission to emigrate to West Germany, she settled in West Berlin in 1987 with her husband, novelist Richard Wagner. Other women who have received the Nobel Prize in Literature are Selga Lagerlöf, Pearl S. Buck, Toni Morrison, Elfriede Jelinek, and Doris Lessing, among others.