ZAGREB, May 21, 2018 – The famous Romanian-born writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Herta Mueller will be a guest of the Philosophical Theatre programme at the Croatian National Theatre (HNK) in Zagreb on May 27.
Mueller was born in 1953 in the village of Nitzkydorf in the Romanian region of Banat. She studied the German and Romanian languages and literatures at Timisoara University.
During the infamous Ceausescu dictatorship, she advocated freedom of speech and encountered censorship in her early works. Shortly after that she was sacked as a translator with a tractor factory after refusing to collaborate with the Romanian secret service. She could not publish in Romania because of her criticism of the regime, and in 1987 she emigrated to Berlin, where she lives today, the HNK said announcing her visit.
Mueller continued her social activism in the West and left the German PEN chapter because she did not want to be in the company of writers from the former German Democratic Republic (DDR) who had collaborated with secret state services.
Most of her works are about different aspects of life under totalitarianism.
Her novels translated into Croatian are The Appointment (Heute waere ich mir lieber nicht begegnet), The Hunger Angel (Atemschaukel), and The Land of Green Plums (Herztier).
After receiving a series of German and international literary awards, in 2009 she won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Mueller will be interviewed by the host of the Philosophical Theatre, philosopher Srećko Horvat.
