Ms. Müller joins the ranks of Nobel laureates — most recently the French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio last year and the Austrian playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek in 2004 — whose work, at the time of their announcements, anyway, was little known and little translated here.

Only 5 of Ms. Muller's some 20 books have been translated into English. Those translations are suddenly in great demand and short supply; the Nobel committee has given American readers another unexpected and vaguely exotic homework assignment.

The choice of Ms. Muller, whose dark, closely observed and sometimes violent work often explores exile and the grim quotidian realities of life under the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, may feed the suspicions that the Nobel Committee has, not for the first time, put political considerations ahead of writerly ones.

Ms. Muller's story is undeniably fascinating. She was born in 1953 in a German-speaking Romanian town. During World War II her father served in the Waffen-SS. Her mother spent years in a work camp in what is now Ukraine. Ms. Muller was later fired from a job as a translator at a Ukrainian machine factory after refusing to be an informant for the secret police. She left Romania for Germany in 1987, along with her husband, Richard Wagner. She has often spoken out against oppression and was critical of East German writers who did collaborate with state authorities.