The Passport

"* 'With the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, Muller depicts the language of the dispossessed', Jury of the Nobel Prize for Literature * 'Appropriately on the side of underdogs from Ceausescu's dystopia to Ukrainian labour camps... so opening the eyes of non-German readers to new worlds. And that, from Beowulf to Muller, is a noble as well as a Nobel function of literature', The Times * '[Muller's] dark, closely observed and sometimes violent work often explores exile and the grim quotidian realities of life under Ceausescu... Her sensibility is often bleak, but the detail in her fiction can whip it alive', New York Times * 'Graphically observed... forces the reader to confront the complex tapestry of Eastern European history in the late 20th Century... a universal writer', Razia Iqbal, BBC Arts Correspondent * 'Muller... has summoned her surrealist imagination to brilliant effect when exposing the horrors of totalitarianism... [The Passport] uses the quality of European folk tale to brilliant effect. Politics and truth-telling, the courage of the witness and the weight of the message often decides the Nobel Literature Prize; in Herta Muller all of these elements are present, yet so too is the artist as the lone voice beckoning, intent on telling a story, on shaping a word picture', Eileen Battersby, Irish Times"