Herta Müller is a Romanian-German novelist, poet, essayist and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was born in Nițchidorf, Timiș County in Romania; her native language is German. Since the early 1990s, she has been internationally established, and her works have been translated into more than twenty languages.

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Romanian-German author Herta Müller "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed." She is the ninth German-language writer to become a recipient of the prize after Günter Grass in 1999.