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.

Last week, the One Hundred Years of Solitude author's literary agent Carmen Balcells told a Chilean newspaper that she didn't think he would write anything else (somewhat galling for her, given that she also revealed Garcia Marquez represented 36.2% of her agency's income). Garcia Marquez's biographer, Gerald Martin, agreed, adding that this wasn't "too regrettable, because as a writer it was his destiny to have the immense satisfaction of having a totally coherent literary career many years before the end of his natural life".

But Garcia Marquez, father of magical realism, author of Love in the Time of Cholera and winner of the 1982 Nobel prize for literature, dismissed these comments yesterday when contacted by a Colombian paper. "Maestro, could you answer some questions for El Tiempo?" he was asked by the paper. "Call me later, I'm writing," the author known affectionately as "Gabo" responded tartly.

When he eventually agreed to answer two questions from El Tiempo, he put paid to the claims that his literary career was over. "Not only is it not true [that I won't return to writing], but the only thing I do is write," he said. Asked if he would publish more books, he responded that his job was "to write, not to publish". "I'll know when the cakes I am baking are ready," the 82-year-old concluded enigmatically.

Garcia Marquez's next book will be a love story, though his friend and fellow writer Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza said that the author was struggling to come up with a version that he was happy with. "He has four versions of it," Apuleyo said. "He told me that he was now trying to get the best from each of them."

Apuleyo, who co-wrote a book of conversations with García Marquez called The Smell of the Guava Tree in 1982, said the Nobel prizewinner had become hugely self-critical and demanding of himself. Two years ago, Garcia Marquez said: "I've stopped writing ... 2005 was the first year in my life that I didn't write a line."

He admitted, though, that his problem was one of enthusiasm rather than inspiration. "With all the practice I've got, I'd have no problems writing a new novel," he explained. "But people notice if you haven't put your heart into it." Apuleyo said Garcia Marquez described his year without writing as "a sabbatical", during which he had devoted his time to reading.

"To provide nearly everyone on the planet with a liquid crystal display is utopian," he said. "Are we not, therefore, in the process of creating a new elite, of drawing a new line to divide the world between those who have access to communication and knowledge, and those who are left out?"

For Le Clezio, the book, despite its old-fashioned appearance, remains the best tool for disseminating information to the furthest corners of the planet. "It is practical, easy to handle, economical," he said. "It does not require any particular technological prowess, and keeps well in any climate." Publishers must support literary translation and act creatively so that books are no longer an inaccessible luxury for many, he said.

"Joint publication with developing countries, the establishment of funds for lending libraries and mobile libraries, and, overall, greater attention to requests from and works in so-called minority languages -- which are often clearly in the majority -- would enable literature to continue to be this wonderful tool for self-knowledge, for the discovery of others, and for listening to the concert of humankind, in all the rich variety of its themes and modulations."

Doris Lessing described winning the Nobel prize as a "bloody disaster", so perhaps it's unsurprising that she turned down a Damehood. Offered the honour in 1992 by Alex Allan, then principal private secretary to the prime minister, Lessing declined on the grounds that the British Empire no longer exists.

"Thank you for offering me this honour: I am very pleased. But for some time now I have been wondering, 'But where is this British Empire?', Lessing wrote to Allan. "Surely, there isn't one. And now I see that I am not the only one saying the same. There is something ruritannical about honours given in the name of a non-existent Empire."

Lessing, now 89, said that when she was young, she did her best "to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia", saying that "surely there is something unlikeable about a person, when old, accepting honours from a institution she attacked when young?".

Her letter to Allan finished on a whimsical note. "And yet... how pleasant to be a dame! I would adore it. Dame of what? Dame of Britain? Dame of the British Islands? Dame of the British Commonwealth? Dame of ....? Never mind. Please forgive my churlishness. I am sorry, I really am."

"I have a strong suspicion that there has been a leak in the system this time," Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy told The Associated Press in an e-mail Friday. "I don't want to say more."

Ladbrokes saw such a surge in speculation on Le Clezio leading up to the announcement that it decided to halt betting on Wednesday. "Suddenly, there were more and more bets on him," said Lasse Dilschman, head of Ladbrokes' Nordic division. "The odds went from 15-to-1 to below 2-1. That's when we decided to close."

Born in 1940, Le Clézio first found fame in 1963 with his first novel Proces-Verbal, which was awarded the Prix Renaudot. Since then he has published a wide variety of novels, essays and short fiction. The Academy saluted his achievement, calling him an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization".

He is due to receive the award of 10m Swedish Krona (815,000 pounds sterling) at a ceremony in the Swedish capital in December.

Le Clezio, known as France's "nomad novelist", lives mainly in New Mexico in the US, in near seclusion, and is the opposite of Paris's current trend for writers' navel-gazing accounts of their sex lives.

The Swedish jury hailed his scathing critiques of urban western civilisation and the "poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy" of his stories of native populations in Africa and Latin America. His novels, whose settings range from the Sahara to Mauritius, are expected to see a massive sales boost in Britain, where he is currently out of print and barely known.

Le Clezio, 68, last year signed an open letter with other writers appealing for French literature to be more open to the wider world. Last night he batted off talk of French cultural stagnation. "I deny it," he said. "It's a very rich, very diversified culture. There's no risk of decline."

In Paris Le Clezio is seen as one of France's greatest living writers. He says his work is defined by his mixed roots. He was born in Nice but most identifies with the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, where his Breton ancestors fled in the 18th century and lived for generations before returning to France.

As the Swedish Academy enters final deliberations for this year's award, permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said it's no coincidence that most winners are European. "Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world ... not the United States," he said in an exclusive interview Tuesday.

He said the 16-member award jury has not selected this year's winner, and dropped no hints about who was on the short list. Americans Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates usually figure in speculation, but Engdahl wouldn't comment on any names. Speaking generally about American literature, however, he said U.S. writers are "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture," dragging down the quality of their work. "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," Engdahl said. "That ignorance is restraining."

His comments were met with fierce reactions from literary officials across the Atlantic. "You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures," said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.

"And if he looked harder at the American scene that he dwells on, he would see the vitality in the generation of Roth, Updike, and DeLillo, as well as in many younger writers, some of them sons and daughters of immigrants writing in their adopted English. None of these poor souls, old or young, seem ravaged by the horrors of Coca-Cola."

The foundation, which had said Lessing would be unable to attend the prize ceremony because of ill health, said on Monday Nicholas Pearson would read out Lessing's address on December 7. "She has back problems," foundation spokeswoman Annika Pontikis said.

The lectures by each winner are a highlight of Nobel Week celebrations, which include ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo to award the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.57 million) prize. Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek, who won the literature prize in 2004, and British playwright Harold Pinter, the 2005 winner, also missed the ceremony but both pre-recorded their traditional lectures for airing during Nobel week.