AP, 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. [Read more]