German author Herta Mueller won the 2009 Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday for her work inspired by her life under Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship in Romania.

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

The permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Peter Englund, described Mueller as "a great artist of words."

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 long been cited as a probable winner, and the award finally came just ahead of the 20th anniversary of the collapse of communism.

"I feel free now but these things have not been erased," Mueller told reporters in Berlin, where she now lives. "I know what it is to be afraid every morning that by the evening you won't exist any more."

One of the lucky ones

"In your head it's not over, even if that time is over," she said.

She said she was one of the lucky ones, having made it out of Romanian dictator Ceausescu's regime to escape to West Germany in 1987.

"I lived through 30 years of dictatorship," Mueller, with jet-black hair, striking blue eyes and bright red lipstick, told a packed news conference. "There are lots of others who didn't make it."

The grim daily life under Ceausescu's oppressive regime and the harsh treatment of Romanian Germans has featured strongly in her works. Her first published book had to be smuggled out of Romania to avoid censors.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Mueller's Nobel win was "a wonderful sign" 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Mueller was born on August 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 after the war.

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