Herta Müller was forced to emigrate from her native Romania in 1987. For years she had been spied on by the secret police, the Securitate, forced out of a job, brutally interrogated and had her work censored.

Even when she and her writer husband Richard Wagner moved to West Berlin – where she still lives – she still found herself in the sights of informers and agents. At least one of them – she has recently found out from her old Securitate files – was a close friend. She recently chronicled this harrassment in a long article to mark the publication of her latest book, which appears in German as Atemschaukel (to be translated as "Everything I Possess, I Carry with Me").

The theme of life under dictatorship runs through her substantial literary work. She was brought up in Nitchidorf, a German-speaking community in Timisoara county, western Romania. The German minority was closely monitored by the communist authorities; key positions were infiltrated by members of the secret police. Even now, Ms Müller claims, associations representing Germans in Romania have contacts with the democratically controlled successor organisation of Ceausescu's spies.

Her first book, a collection of short stories entitled Niederungen (Nadirs), was heavilly censored by the Romanian authorities in 1982 but the manuscript was smuggled into Germany and found a large audience there. The book was followed by Drückender Tango (Oppressive Tango), which depicted Romania as anything but a socialist paradise. Her description of corrupt village life was seen as a microcosm of the society as a whole, a textured portrait of how morality had been eroded by the often unhinged leadership and its swaggering bureaucrats.

In all Ms Müller has written 21 books in German and a few have been translated well into English, including Herztier, which appeared as The Land of Green Plums (Metropolitan books, New York, 1996).

To accompany the publication of Atemschaukel – which chronicles a post-war deportation to the Soviet Union – she recently revealed something of her own experience of a police state, the personal loneliness felt by free-thinking writers in a dictatorship.

She turns it into an indictment not only of Ceausescu but of the 20 years that came afterwards, the survival of corrupt networks of power.

"Ceausescu's secret police, the Securitate, has not disbanded, it was just given another name, the Romanian Information Service," she writes. "According to their own figures, 40 per cent of the staff was taken on from the Securitate and the remaining 60 per cent are retired and living on pensions that are three times higher than those of everybody elese, or they are the new architects of the market economy."

She recalls working as a translator in a tractor factory and how she was barred from meetings with foreign businessmen. Then she was invited to become a member of the Securitate herself in order to continue working as a translator. "After my second refusal, his [the recruiting officer's] farewell words were: 'You'll be sorry, we'll drown you in the river'."

The police then spread rumours in the factory and beyond that Herta Müller was an agent. That, she says, is how a dictatorship ties you in impossible knots.

"You can get used to death threats. They are part of this one life we have ... but slander steals your soul. You feel surrounded by horror."

Once, on her way to the hairdresser's in Romania, she was seized by a man in plain clothes who led her into the basement of a student's hall of residence. The chief interrogator started verbally to abuse her.

"He demanded to see my identity card," writes Ms Müller, "and said: 'Well, you whore, here we meet again'. I had never seen him before. He said I was having sex with eight Arab students in exchange for tights and cosmetics. I didn't know a single Arab student."

Ms Müller angrily denied the charges. But because she had been thrown out of work, she could be charged and jailed under the classic communist charge of "parasitism", so she was nervous.

The interrogator replied: "If we want to, we'll find 20 Arabs as witnesses. You'll see, it will make for a wonderful trial."

Ms Müller was kicked in the small of her back; outside the room a woman was screaming, perhaps under torture, perhaps on a tape recording.

"Then I was forced to eat eight hard-boiled eggs and green onions with salt," she says. Shortly afterwards she was kicked out of the basement and allowed to vomit in the grass.

Eight boiled eggs? Ms Müller has an eye for the surreal detail of a police state and has made it into strong, muscular literature. The Swedish Academy hailed her as a writer who, "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed".

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