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Another winner in the recently announced 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was German writer Herta Mueller and she won the literature category. She was honored for her works that “with the concentration of poetry and frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed,” said the Swedish Academy.

Muller, 56, was born in Romania and immigrated to Germany in 1987. She made her debut in the literature scene 1982 via book called “Niederunger” or “Lowlands” which is a collection of short stories. The book was promptly censored by her then-communist government.

An uncensored version of the book managed to be smuggled in Germany in 1984. It was published there and it was greatly received by a small German-speaking village in Romania. The book was followed by “Oppressive Tango” in Romania.

The Swedish Academy said, “The Romanian national press was very critical of these works while, outside Romania, the German press received them very positively. Because Mueller had publicly criticized the dictatorship in Romania, she was prohibited from publishing in her own country.”

Two years before dictator  Nicolae Ceausescu was toppled from power amid the widening communist collapse across Eastern Europe, Muller immigrated to Germany with her husband. Her parents were members of the German-speaking minority in Romania and her father served in the Waffen SS during World War II.

Most of Mueller’s works were in German, but some have been translated into English, French and Spanish, like “The Passport,” “The Land of Green Plums,” “The Appointment,” and “Travelling on One Leg.”

She is the 12th woman to receive the Nobel Prize in literature, joining the ranks of previous winners like Austria’s Elfriede Jelinek in 2004 and British writer Doris Lessing in 2007. Mueller will received 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) for her prize, which will be awarded to her on December 10 in the Swedish capital.