Herta Müller

Herta Müller was little known outside German Studies before the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009, not least because very few of her works had been translated into English. Since then the situation has improved slowly: new translations have appeared, but there are still surprisingly few English-language critical volumes. Bettina Brandt and Valentina Glajar’s volume is one of only two standalone publications on the author to appear since Müller hit international headlines in 2009. Co-editors Brandt and Glajar have both published widely on Müller’s work, although they do not contribute chapters to this volume. Their international lineup of contributors bring new angles to some of the recurring themes in critical interpretations of Müller’s writing, particularly to a dominant strand that reads her works as expressing trauma. As the subtitle of the volume suggests, much attention is given to Müller’s “aesthetics of experimentation”: despite the clear relevance of autobiographical aspects, here Müller is rightly treated as an innovative, creative writer

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