STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN - German author Herta Mueller won the 2009 Nobel Literature Prize yesterday for her work inspired by her life under Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship in Romania.

The Nobel jury hailed Ms Mueller, 56, as a writer who, 'with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed'.

Ms Mueller said she was 'stunned' by the honour, in a statement released by her publisher.

'I am stunned and still cannot believe it. I can't say any more right now,' she was quoted as saying in a letter from her German publishing house, Carl Hanser Verlag.

Ms Mueller was born in a German-speaking region of Romania and fled the country two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. She has been a long-standing candidate for the award, which comes just ahead of the 20th anniversary of the collapse of communism.

The permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Mr Peter Englund, described Ms Mueller as 'a great artist of words', as he explained the 223-year-old institution's choice to Swedish Radio.

'One can say that her work is a combination of, on the one side, a fantastic language - she is very distinctive, you need only read half a page to realise this is Herta Mueller - and its composition, its short sentences, full of imagery, and it is also her extreme precision and how she uses the language.'

The grim daily life under Ceausescu's oppressive regime and the harsh treatment of Romanian Germans have featured strongly in her works. Corruption, intolerance and repression are also major themes in her writing.

She was born on Aug 17, 1953, in western Romania to parents of the German-speaking minority. Her father was in the Nazi SS during World War II, and the Romanian communists deported her mother to a labour camp in Soviet Ukraine for five years after the war.

Ms Mueller was sacked from her first job as a translator in the 1970s after refusing to work for Ceausescu's hated Securitate secret police.

She then devoted her life to literature. Her first collection of short stories, Niederungen, in 1982 - published as Nadirs in English - was censored by the Romanian regime and published in full only two years later in Germany after being smuggled out.

Ms Mueller depicted the exile of German Romanians in the Soviet Union in her latest novel Atemschaukel from 2009.

She fled Romania for Germany in 1987 after being prohibited from publishing in her country, and it was then that she was fully discovered in the literary world.

Her major novels include The Passport, published in 1986 in Germany and translated into English in 1989, and The Appointment, translated in 2001 and which describes the anxiety of a woman summoned by the Securitate.

Mr Ioan Mascovescu, mayor of the Romanian village of Nitchidorf, from which Ms Mueller hails, said the house in which she was born is now state property, but she still owns land she inherited there.

In a 2007 article for the German daily Frankfurter Rundschau, Ms Mueller described Ceausescu, who was shot dead at the end of an uprising, as 'a parvenu with water taps and gold cutlery with a real weakness for palaces'.

She said Romania had developed 'collective amnesia' over its repressive past.

'They are pretending that it disappeared into thin air, the whole country is afflicted by collective amnesia. Even though it was home to the most abstruse dictatorship in eastern Europe and, after Stalin, the most evil dictator, with a personality cult to rival North Korea's,' she wrote.

After the main science awards this week, the Peace Prize will be announced today, and the Economics Prize will wrap up the awards on Monday.