Her grandfather was a wealthy farmer and businessman. He was expropriated under the communist regime. Her mother was deported to years of hard labor in the USSR was. Her father, a former SS soldier, earned his living as a truck driver.

After high school she studied at the University of the West Timisoara Germanic and Romanian literature. From 1976 she worked as a translator in a machine shop, but was dismissed in 1979 following its refusal to cooperate with the Romanian Securitate. She earned her living with a temporary teaching in schools and kindergartens as well as with private German lessons.

Her first book was in 1982 in Romania lowlands, like all publications, only censored version will appear. 1987 Herta Muller traveled with her then-husband, the writer Richard Wagner, into the Federal Republic of Germany. In the following years, she received a number of teaching posts as a "writer in residence" at universities at home and abroad. 2005 was her "Heiner Müller visiting professor" at the Free University in Berlin, where she lives today.

Herta Muller was a member until her resignation in 1997 the PEN Center Germany, since 1995 she is a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature.

2008 an internal debate ensued about the participation of the historian Sorin Antohi and Wendelin Andrei Corbea-Hoisie at a meeting of the "Romanian Cultural Institute in Berlin on 25 July 2008, although both were informers of the Securitate in communist Romania. Herta Müller criticized the invitation in an open letter. In the context of this dispute stemming from the Banat, historian, philosopher and writer Carl Gibson Herta Müller attacked and shot her in the book "symphony of freedom" system loyalty among the Ceausescu regime.

In an article in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, 23 July 2009, entitled "The Securitate is still in service" describes Herta Müller However, what intrigues of the Romanian secret service, she was suspended, and still is today. The files reveal the Securitate, and that they ensure that their tireless criticism of the Ceausescu dictatorship by Diskreditierungsmassnahmen should be discredited. Thus, as designed by the Securitate sent letters to German radio stations, in which she was accused as an agent. Furthermore, they accused persons in the country's leading team of the Banat Swabians, the informal workers of the Securitate were writing on behalf of the Communist Party of Romania.

2009 her novel Breath swing for the German Book Prize has been nominated and reached the final of the six best novels. In this book the author traces the journey of a young man in a deportation camp in Russia, is exemplary for the fate of the German population in Transylvania after the Second World War. It served as a model while the experience of the poet died in 2006, Oskar Pastior.

On 8 October 2009 it was announced that Herta Müller is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. She had "drawn by compression of the objectivity of the prose, poetry and landscape of homelessness," was the word on the assessment. They based the award of the Nobel Prize with the intensity of the literature written by her.