Notes
Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Granta Books, 1998; originally published in Germany in 1993 by Rowohlt Verlag, under the title Herztier), 242 pp. £9.99 paper.
The novel is clearly based on Herta Müller's personal experience during the dictatorship of Ceausescu. Born and educated in Romania, where she became a teacher, she lost her job after refusing to cooperate with the infamous Securitate, the Romanian Secret Service, from which she suffered repeated threats. Like her nameless narrator, she finally succeeded in emigrating to Germany in 1987. She received many prizes for her work including the Kleist Prize, Germany's most prestigious literary award. Herta Müller's other books are The Passport, translated by Martin Chalmers (Serpents Tail, 1989); Traveling on One Leg, translated by Valentina Glajar and André Lefèvere (Northwestern University Press, 1998); Nadirs, European Women Writers Series (University of Nebraska Press, 1999).