Nobel laureate in literature Herta Mueller will be the guest speaker at the Philosophy Theatre, a series of talks held at the Croatian National Theatre, in Zagreb on Sunday, May 27.

Herta Mueller was born in Romania in 1953, where she studied German and Romanian language and literature.

During Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship in communist Romania she spoke in support of freedom of speech, which resulted in censorship of her early works. Soon, she was banned from publishing her writing altogether. In the 1980s, she emigrated to Berlin, where she lives today.

The majority of her work deals with life in totalitarianism and the cruelty, violence, and fear experienced by those who live in those systems.

In 2009, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, with the Stockholm Royal Academy saying that her writing, “depicts the landscape of the dispossessed with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose.”

Her notable works include The Hunger Angel (Atemschaukel), The Appointment (Heute war ich mir lieber nicht begegnet), and The Land of Green Plums (Herztier).

The Philosophical Theatre is part of the Croatian National Theatre (HNK) programme, established in 2014 by the Croatian author and philosopher Srecko Horvat. Through monthly debates, it aims to re-establish the theatre as a place of free discourse and the exchange of ideas, not only on the subjects of philosophy and the arts, but politics, sociology, and other global issues. Many distinguished philosophers, authors, and artists were guests at the debates, including the English literary critic Terry Eagleton, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, the French economist Thomas Piketty, and the Bulgarian critic Julia Kristeva.