In 2009, Herta Müller won the Nobel Prize in Literature. During the presentation ceremony, Anders Olsson, member of the Swedish Academy, referred to The Land of Green Plums as "a masterful account of the flight of a group of youths from the terror regime". Immediately following the announcement, sales of this and Müller's other novels (five had been translated into English by thenThe German Handelsblatt reported on the media coverage in the United States and cited the article by Rich and Kulich in The New York Times, but says four, not five novels were translated into English. ) skyrocketed: "On Thursday morning, when the award was announced, The Land of Green Plums, by all accounts Müller's best book, was No. 56,359 on Amazon.com; by the close of business that day, it was No. 7".
