Fox Was Ever the Hunter

HERTA MÜLLER was born as part of a German-speaking minority in Romania in 1953. She attended school and university in Timisoara. After refusing to work for the Romanian Secret Service, the Securitate, she lost her job as a translator in a machine factory. In 1987, she emigrated to Germany and has lived in Berlin ever since. She writes in German and has a string of literary prizes to her name, including the Aspekte Literature Prize (1984), the Kleist Prize (1994), the Prix Aristeion (1995), the Konrad Adenauer prize for literature (2004), the Nobel Prize in Literature (2009) and the Heinrich Böll Prize from the city of Cologne (2015).

Extraordinary... Muller lays bare the totalitarian attack on the individual and the everyday horror of life under a repressive regime. There is a cinematic intensity to the narrative... This ethereal, other-worldly atmosphere gradually gives way to the horrors of a more defined reality... The mounting tension made tangible by such scenes is felt most intensely in Muller's language. Short, clipped sentences accumulate, overlapping and building into a noisy, symphonic whole... A profoundly unsettling novel, which renders palpable the cruelty of life under the regime, as well as the brittle exhilarations of its overthrow