By MATT MOORE and KARL RITTER, Associated Press Writers
Herta Mueller, a little-known Romanian-born author who was persecuted for her critical depictions of life behind the Iron Curtain, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature Thursday in an award seen as a nod to the 20th anniversary of communism’s collapse.

The decision was expected to keep alive the controversy surrounding the academy’s pattern of awarding the prize to European writers.

Mueller, a member of Romania’s ethnic German minority, was honored for work that “with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed,” the Swedish Academy said.