I've had to learn to live by writing, not the other way round. Herta Müller wins Nobel Prize in Literature

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3/24/2010
The beautiful brain of Sherman Alexie: War Dances wins 2010 Pen/Faulkner Award

3/13/2010
It's terrible to be possessed by brittle things: Elena Fanailova's The Russian Version wins the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry

2/28/2010
Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award to D. A. Powell

2/5/2010
Of course, I’d forgotten she’d died: An extract from A Scattering by Christopher Reid, the 2009 Costa Book of the Year

12/19/2009
The wedding guests look upon the cracked, pink lips of Rosie's bridegroom - an extract from Petina Gappah's An Elegy for Easterly, the 2009 Guardian First Book Award winning book

11/22/2009
Those who saw him hushed: Let the Great World Spin, the National Book Award winner by Colum McCann

10/21/2009
Four Canadians tortured in the name of fighting Terror, Kerry Pither wins Ottawa Book Award for Dark Days

10/10/2009
I've had to learn to live by writing, not the other way round. Herta Müller wins Nobel prize in literature

9/23/2009
I knew I had no hope of winning: Simon Van Booy wins Frank O'Connor Short Story Award for Love Begins in Winter

9/15/2009
I saw my soul become flesh: Jean Valentine wins Wallace Stevens Award

7/5/2009
Philip Hoare wins 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for Leviathan

6/24/2009
R. Bruce Elder wins 2009 Robert Motherwell Book Award

5/12/2009
Jane Mayer wins 2009 Helen Bernstein Award for The Dark Side

5/7/2009
Cormac McCarthy wins lifetime achievement, PEN/Saul Bellow Award

4/26/2009
Louise Erdrich's 2009 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winning book: The Plague of Doves

4/15/2009
Climatologist David Archer wins 2009 Walter P. Kistler Book Award for The Long Thaw

3/26/2009
Avi Sharon wins Harold Morton Landon Translation Award for C. P. Cavafy's Selected Poems

3/22/2009
Thomas G. Andrews wins 2009 Bancroft Prize for Killing for Coal

2/27/2009
2009 PEN/Faulkner Award to Joseph O'Neill for Netherland

2/21/2009
Stephanie E. Smallwood wins Frederick Douglass Book Prize for Saltwater Slavery

1/28/2009
2008 Costa Book of the Year Award to Sebastian Barry for The Secret Scripture

1/11/2009
MLA Awards First Book Prize to Dana Luciano for Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America

1/6/2009
Costa Book Award to Diana Athill, aged 91

12/9/2008
Guardian First Book Award for The Rest Is Noise

11/27/2008
National Book Award winner Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello

11/3/2008
Mohammed Hanif on Guardian First Book Award for A Case of Exploding Mangoes

10/18/2008
Indian writer, Aravind Adiga, wins 2008 Man Booker Prize

10/10/2008
French novelist J. M. G. Le Clezio wins Nobel Prize for Literature

9/3/2008
Edward Alwood wins Tankard Book Award for Dark Days in the Newsroom

8/24/2008
Britian's oldest book prize to Rosalind Belben for Our Horses in Egypt

8/10/2008
Michelle De Kretser wins New South Wales Premier's Book of the Year Award for The Lost Dog

7/30/2008
Kay Ryan announced as new Poet Laureate

7/16/2008
Salman Rushdie knighted as Best of the Booker Prize winners

7/4/2008
No consolation prize for Tom Bullough whose book, The Claude Glass, was mistakenly announced as the 2008 Wales Book of the Year

7/2/2008
Wales Book of the Year to Dannie Abse for The Presence

6/28/2008
Margaret Atwood wins Prince of Asturias Award for Letters

6/19/2008
Royal Society Prize for Science Books goes to Mark Lynas for Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

6/13/2008
Rawi Hage wins wins the €100,000 Impac Dublin literary award for debut novel De Niro's Game

6/9/2008
Rose Tremain captures Orange Broadband Prize

6/2/2008
Red House Children's Book Award to Derek Landy for Skulduggery Pleasant

5/5/2008
Graham Robb wins 2008 Ondaatje Prize

5/2/2008
Raja Shehadeh wins Orwell Prize for Palestinian Walks

4/22/2008
2008 Krasnza-Krausz Book Awards announced

4/12/2008
Francis Parkman Prize to Jean Edward Smith for FDR

4/3/2008
Michael Billington wins Theatre Book Prize for The State of the Nation

4/1/2008
Marcus Rediker wins the 2008 Merle Curti Award for The Slave Ship

3/27/2008
Indra Sinha wins the South East Asia and South Pacific regional Commonwealth Writers' Best Book Prize for Animal's People

3/8/2008
2008 National Book Critics Circle Award to Harriet A. Washington for Medical Apartheid

3/5/2008
2008 Lionel Gelber Prize to Paul Collier for The Bottom Billion

3/1/2008
Robert Kirsch Award to Maxine Hong Kingston

10/10/2009 I've had to learn to live by writing, not the other way round. Herta Müller wins Nobel Prize in Literature

I've had to learn to live by writing, not the other way round. I wanted to live by the standards I dreamt of, it's as simple as that. And writing was a way for me to voice what I could not actually live. - Herta Müller speaking to an unidentified journalist.

She is an excellent author with truly fantastic language, on the one hand. On the other she has the capacity of really giving you a sense of what it's like living in a dictatorship, also what it's like to be part of a minority in another country and what it's like to be an exile. She is talking about really big issues like that. - Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, speaking about Herta Müller following the announcement that she had won 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The cemetery was made of rocks. There were boulders on the graves.

When I looked down on the ground I noticed that the soles of my shoes were turned up. All that time, I had been walking on my shoelaces. Long and heavy, they were lying behind me, their ends curled up.

Two staggering little men were lifting the coffin from the hearse and lowering it into the grave with two tattered ropes. The coffin was swinging. Their arms and their ropes got longer and longer. The grave was filled with water despite the drought. Your father killed a lot of people, one of the drunk little men said.

I said: he was in the war. For every twenty-five killed he got a medal. He brought home several medals.

He raped a woman in a turnip field, the little man said. Together with four other soldiers. Your father stuck a turnip between her legs. When we left she was bleeding. She was Russian. For weeks afterwards, we would call all weapons turnips.

It was late fall, the little man said. The turnip leaves were black and folded over by frost. Then the little man put a big rock on the coffin.

The other drunk little man continued:

For the New Year, we went to the opera in a small German town. The singer's voice was as piercing as the Russian woman's screams. One after the other, we left the theater. Your father stayed till the end. For weeks afterwards, he called all songs turnips and all women turnips.

- an excerpt from The Funeral Sermon, the first story in Herta Müller's first book, Nadirs (Niederungen, 1982). Click here to read The Funeral Sermon in its entirety.

Nadirs
Herta Müller
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The Land of Green Plums
Herta Müller
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The Appointment: A Novel
Herta Müller
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