The Romanian writer Herta Muller will tonight be formally awarded the third International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for her powerful novel, The Land of Green Plums. The prize, which she says "was a real surprise", assures her international reputation, will increase her readership and is worth £75,000 to her and £25,000 to the translator, Michael Hofmann.
Yesterday at an IMPAC luncheon she said she had written the book in honour of two friends who had died under the Ceausescu regime which had forced her to leave her country.
Speaking in English, she described growing up in Timis, a small village in Southern Romania. At home she spoke a local dialect and her first language was German. "I went to a German-speaking school. Everything was German, we only spent a few hours a week studying Romanian. My grandfather never learnt the language. Everything was fractured by history. Before the first World War, it was part of the Hapsburg Empire."
She is a small woman with a strong humorous face. Dressed in black, her hair is currently bright red and her toenails are painted blue.
This novel is important to her but as she says, "I have written nine or 10 other books, including some collections of essays which are political as well as literary." The Land of Green Plums was published in the US in 1996 and will be published in London next month.
Living in Germany has meant more to her than survival alone. `Writing in German in Romania meant I was at a distance from most of the people I knew. It is not the language that is spoken by the majority".
She has spent some time in the US and three years ago worked at the University of Pennsylvania for four months. Language and "the way meanings shift' preoccupy her. Referring to an earlier novel The Passport, which was published in Berlin in 1986, about a year before she left Romania, she says, "I am not quite so sure about that translation." With this one, brilliantly translated by poet Michael Hofmann, she says, "I took the English and read it against the German and felt I could understand every word. It made me feel confident."
Even after she left Romania she was not free of the Securitate. "No, no, they kept up their pressure. There was no peace." Does she feel German or Romanian? "I am somewhere in between. I am no longer a country person, I've lived in cities since I was 15." Fired from her teaching job, she left Romania. "My mother came with me to Germany. She knew I could never come back. I am an only child, I have no children myself and my father was dead".
What was the atmosphere of fear like to live under? "It brings the good and the bad. The good things about people, the bad things." Her new life in Germany has not made her complacent. She has been outspoken about racism there and has mixed feelings about unification. "There are dangers facing democracy. You must remember the people in West Germany had 40 years of democracy before the Wall fell." Does she ever think about what her life was like in Romania? "Well" she shrugs, "there are no nightmares now. But when I heard Ceausescu had died, I cried. I had thought he was immortal. A devil who wouldn't die. But he was human", she said with heavy irony.
