Herta Müller is a Romanian-born German novelist, poet, and essayist, known for her works depicting the effects of violence, cruelty, and terror under the repressive regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu in the Socialist Republic of Romania. She was born on 17 August 1953 in Nițchidorf, Timiș County, Romania, and her native languages are German and Romanian.

Müller has been internationally recognized since the early 1990s, with her works translated into more than twenty languages. Notably, her 2009 novel The Hunger Angel (Atemschaukel) portrays the deportation of Romania's German minority to Soviet Gulags during the Soviet occupation of Romania for use as forced labor.

Müller has received more than twenty awards, including the Kleist Prize (1994), the Aristeion Prize (1995), the International Dublin Literary Award (1998), and the Franz Werfel Human Rights Award (2009). She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009, with the Swedish Academy describing her as someone "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed."