Juxtaposing reality and fantasy, nightmares and dark laughter, "Nadirs" is a collection of largely autobiographical stories based on Herta Muller's childhood in the Romanian countryside. The individual tales reveal a child's often nightmarish impressions of life in her village. Seamlessly mixing reality with dream-like images, they brilliantly convey the inner, troubled life of a child and at the same time capture the violence and corruption of life under an oppressive state. Herta Muller has been one of the most prolific and acclaimed German-language writers of the last two decades. Born in 1953 in the Banat, a German-language region of Romania, she emigrated to West Berlin in 1987 and currently lives in Berlin. She has received numerous literary awards, including the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. Sieglinde Lug is a professor emerita of German and comparative literature at the University of Denver

赫塔·米勒（Herta Müller），1953年8月17日生於羅馬尼亞蒂米什縣一個農民傢庭，村莊以德語為通用語言。1982年，處女作短篇小說集《低地》齣版。1987年與丈夫小說傢理查德·瓦格移居西德，現常居柏林。

赫塔·米勒曾多次獲德國的文學奬項，2009年獲諾貝爾文學奬。