The 2009 Nobel literature prize winner Herta Mueller says she started writing when it was no longer possible to use spoken words to describe what was happening in her native Romania under dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

Mueller says she was persecuted after refusing to become an informant and she paid tribute to those who live under totalitarian regimes today.

She said in her Nobel lecture on Monday that she wanted to express how dictatorships deprive people of dignity. She said she reacted "to the fear of death with a thirst for life."

The 56-year-old writer smuggled her early work into Germany to have it published, and she moved there in 1987. She will receive the ward Thursday at a ceremony in Stockholm with other Nobel prize winners.