International Dublin Literary Award
- The novel and its English translation won the 1998 International Dublin Literary Award;[29] Müller received £75,000, and translator Michael Hofmann £25,000.[30] In its comments, the jury remarked on the main themes of the novel—politics, language, and allegory, saying:
The novel brilliantly evokes a world of cruelty and oppression. Set in Communist Romania under the Ceaucescu dictatorship, The Land of Green Plums portrays the lives of a group of dissident students and teachers whose integrity is continuously assailed and sometimes betrayed. Herta Müller's stark and vivid prose explores a terror-stricken society of mendacity and political slander. The "green plums" of the title stand in part for truth and its brutal suppression in a world of interrogators and informers, where speaking out can become a matter of life and death.
The author's style, achieves a spartan eloquence, and the novel's individual characters are powerfully drawn.
This elegantly understated book is at once bleak and beautiful, humorous and heartbreaking.[31]
The International Dublin Literary Award drew attention to the novel,[32][33][34] and by the end of the year, it had been published in paperback in the US by Hydra Books/Northwestern University Press.[35]
2009 Nobel Prize in Literature
In 2009, Herta Müller won the Nobel Prize in Literature. During the presentation ceremony, Anders Olsson, member of the Swedish Academy, referred to The Land of Green Plums as "a masterful account of the flight of a group of youths from the terror regime".[36] Immediately following the announcement, sales of this and Müller's other novels (five had been translated into English by then[10][37]) skyrocketed: "On Thursday morning, when the award was announced, The Land of Green Plums, by all accounts Müller's best book, was No. 56,359 on Amazon.com; by the close of business that day, it was No. 7".[38]
