Herta Mueller, a little-known Romanian-born author won the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature today in an award seen as a nod to the 20th anniversary of communism's collapse, according to AP. The decision was expected to keep alive the controversy surrounding the academy's pattern of awarding the prize to European writers. Mueller, a member of Romania's ethnic German minority, 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. «I am very surprised and still cannot believe it,» Mueller said in a statement released by her publisher in Germany, where she is widely renowned. «I can't say anything more at the moment.»
