Born in Romania in 1953, Herta Muller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceausescu's Secret Police. She succeeded in emigrating in 1987 and now lives in Berlin. The recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the European Literature Prize, she also won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for her novel, The Land of Green Plums. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009.
