Novel Prize Winner for Literature: "You read half the page and you know at once that it's Herta Mueller."

Mueller, 56, made her debut in 1982 with a collection of short stories titled "Niederungen," or "Nadirs," depicting the harshness of life in a small, German-speaking village in Romania.It was promptly censored by the communist government.

In 1984 an uncensored version was smuggled to Germany, where it was published and devoured by readers. That work was followed by "Oppressive Tango" in Romania but she was eventually prohibited from publishing inside her country for her criticism of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's rule and its feared secret police, the Securitate.

"The Romanian national press was very critical of these works while, outside of Romania, the German press received them very positively," the Academy said.

SHOOT: That's the sort of writer I intend being known as. A powerful voice, sincere, someone whose work begins to change a collective consensus for the better.

clipped from news.yahoo.com STOCKHOLM – Herta Mueller, a member of Romania's ethnic German minority who was persecuted for her critical depictions of life behind the Iron Curtain, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature Thursday in an award seen as a nod to the 20th anniversary of communism's collapse. Mueller was honored for work that "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed," the Swedish Academy said. The decision was expected to keep alive the controversy surrounding the academy's pattern of awarding the prize to European writers. "If you are European (it is) easier to relate to European literature," Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, told The Associated Press. "It's the result of psychological bias that we really try to be aware of. It's not the result of any program." "I think that there is an incredible force in what she writes, she has a very, very unique style," Englund said.