Romanian-born writer wins Nobel

The judges, apparently, could not help themselves.

Just two days after a Nobel Prize official worried the literature committee was too “Eurocentric,” the winner for 2009 was Herta Mueller, a Romanian-born writer once censored in her native country.

It’s no conspiracy, said permanent secretary Peter Englund. It’s more geography.

“If you are European (it is) easier to relate to European literature,” Englund told the Associated Press after the prize was announced Thursday. “It’s the result of psychological bias that we really try to be aware of. It’s not the result of any program.”

Mueller, 56, whose Nobel was seen as a nod to the 20th anniversary of communism’s collapse, was persecuted in her native Romania for her critical depiction of life behind the Iron Curtain.

She was cited by the committee for “the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose” in such novels as “The Land of Green Plums,” which describe “the landscape of the dispossessed.” Beyond the judges’ praise, she will receive $1.4 million in prize money.

Like last year’s Nobel laureate, Jean-Marie Gustave le Clezio of France, little of Mueller’s work is available in English translation, although various publishers say they plan reissues.