It’s a big week for literary awards. On Tuesday, Wolf Hall won the Man Booker Prize and today (or yesterday depending upon your time zone), Herta Muller won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The committee described Muller as a writer who “with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” Muller grew up during the Nicolae Ceausescu regime and writes from the perspective of living under a totalitarian government. Many noted that she is an appropriate choice for the 20th Anniversary of the fall of communism. I haven’t heard of her before, but what I learned today peaks my interest. Rather than summarizing what is better said by others, here are some interesting links to Mueller information and this year’s Nobel Prize:
- Three Percent, my favorite blog about translated literature, lists reviews for each of Muller’s works that are translated into English. Let me know which one you’re interested in reading, I’m not sure which I want to start with and am in the mood to be easily influenced.
- Michael Orthofer of the The Complete Review/Literary Saloon predicted yesterday that Herta Muller would win and today posted a Herta Muller page full of information about her and her books.
- Book Fox, one of my top two Los Angeles literary blogs, wrote about the speculation that precedes the announcement of the awards, and then about the lessons learned from this year to remember for predicting a future winner of the literature prize.
Awards are fun and frequently I am introduced to new authors and books, which has certainly been my experience with the Nobel Prize. I’m looking forward to discovering Muller’s world.
Tags: Herta Muller, Nobel Prize for Literature, prize speculation, translated books
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I was pleased to see such an accomplished poet/prose writer win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I haven’t read any of her work yet, but I plan to start with Nadirs because its more personal than her other work and I think by reading this first will shed even more light on her previous work.
I’d love to hear about what book you decide to start with.
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