HERTA MÜLLER
Nobel Prize-winning author Herta Müller has a long association with Swansea University’s Centre for Contemporary German Culture. A writer in residence in Swansea in 1996, she returned in 2012 to receive an honorary fellowship from the University. In September 2017, invited by the CCGC, she gave a public reading at the British Library, London, accompanied by her English translator, playwright Philip Boehm. This was followed by a translators’ workshop and an international academic conference at the IMLR, ‘Herta Müller and the Currents of European History’.
About Herta Müller
Müller, one of Europe’s foremost contemporary writers, is one of only twelve women ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature; she is best known for her novels The Land of Green Plums (‘Herztier’ in the original), a story of the terror experienced by herself and her writer friends in communist Romania, and The Hunger Angel (‘Atemschaukel’), an account of life in a Soviet gulag where many Romanian-Germans, including Müller’s own mother, were deported after the Second World War. Her first visit to Swansea, just a few years after her move to the West, was restorative for her; she said ‘I felt very comfortable at the University; comfortable too in the soft landscape with its warm colours and rugged coastline’.
