I don’t care who wins prizes – the Nobel, the Booker, the National Book Award, the Pulitzer, the Goncourt or whatever. Prizes don’t make art.

Prizes, literary and otherwise, are often as much about establishing the power and significance of the prize itself as they are about recognizing and encouraging valuable work. So a writer as scrupulously independent as J.M. Coetzee wins a million dollars, and the Swedish committee's logo is stitched to his name -- forever a "Nobel prize-winning author" -- whether he likes it or not. The trophy is rubbed in the trophy.

There are two good things literature prizes can do: give money to writers who need it, and – because journalism is clueless about art, but loves a contest – bring readers to otherwise overlooked authors. It may have some of that effect for Herta Müller.

Some of Müller's novels are already available in English. One, The Appointment, was in 362nd place on Amazon's ranking of book sales when this sentence was written.

For the curious and impatient, here is Müller's page at the Complete Review, which also found two English-translated samples of her work at signandsight.com.

One is an essay about Müller's persecution by Romanian secret police. It was translated by Karsten Sand Iversen and Christopher Sand-Iversen, who are, presumably, responsible for this:

In order to know that a shadow was needed at six o'clock, my phone must have been tapped."

If Müller really believed that her phone was in on the conspiracy against her, the translators should communicate that with something other than a dangling modifier. The rest is just as bad. The Garnetts, excuse me, the Iversens don't appear to have been the translators of any of her English-language editions.