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Herta Müller
Herta Müller was born on 17 August 1953 in Nitzkydorf (Banat/Romania). Her parents belonged to the German-speaking minority. Her father was a lorry driver, her mother a peasant. She attended school and university in Temeswar. After refusing to work for the Romanian secret service, the Securitate, she lost her job as translator in a machine factory. Nadirs, her first book, lay around at the publishers for four years and was heavily censored when it was eventually published. The manuscript was smuggled to Germany and published in 1984. In 1987, she emigrated to Germany and has lived in Berlin ever since. She has a string of literary prizes to her name, including the Aspekte Literature Prize (1984), the Kleist Prize (1994), the Prix Aristeion (1995), the Konrad Adenauer prize for literature (2004) and, the Nobel Prize for Literature (2009). 'Every object must occupy the place it occupies and I must be the person I am' was written as an afterword to Max Blecher's Adventures in Immediate Irreality, forthcoming from New Directions on 17 February 2015.

Articles Available Online


'Every object must occupy ...'

feature

January 2015

Herta Müller

TR. Philip Boehm

feature

January 2015

I’d like to introduce you to a book, an impressive book that no one read when it first came out in Romania in 1936...

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poetry

November 2014

Like Rabbits

Bethan Roberts

poetry

November 2014

When my husband unrolled the back door of the brewery’s lorry and hoisted first one cage, then another, onto...

Interview

February 2016

Interview with Gerard Byrne

Izabella Scott

Interview

February 2016

I first encountered Gerard Byrne’s eerily dislocated films at Tate Britain, where 1984 and Beyond (2005–7) was shown on...

Interview

November 2011

Interview with Margaret Jull Costa

Sam Gordon

Interview

November 2011

On first impressions, this interview with Margaret Jull Costa, happening as it did – for the most part –...

 

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