This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature has gone to Herta Müller, a Romanian who has written about living in an oppressive, communist society.

St. Louis has a surprising link to Müller’s work: Some of it has been translated by our town’s Philip Boehm.

Boehm is co-translator of Müller’s “The Appointment.” He has also translated or edited other pieces of Müller’s work, including a speech to a 2001 Nobel symposium. The speech, “Can Literature Bear Witness?” is now part of a book titled “Witness Literature.” Müller was born in Romania, but she is of German descent and writes in German.

Even if she’s not a household name in the U.S., Müller has won a lot of awards, Boehm says. He was “a little surprised” she won the Nobel, but notes that the Nobel committee often announces surprise winners in literature. (He notes that it’s “stunning” that Jorge Luis Borges never won a Nobel.) “It’s a committee and things on committees always work in mysterious ways.”

Of Müller, he says: “Her prose is very evocative and puts us in the mind of the character. It evokes both the psychology of the character and the environment of oppression in which the character lives.”

Some of the Nobel judges may have read his co-translation of “The Appointment.” They probably read Müller in a combination of the original German and in English, he says. Boehm also did some editing of the laureate’s famous “The Land of Green Plums.”

He learned of the Nobel announcement by reading a Polish newspaper, Gazeta, online about 6:30 a.m. St. Louis time.

“The Polish papers make a big deal about the Nobel Prize in Literature.”

Besides his work in translation, Boehm writes plays and is artistic director of Upstream Theater company. He’s married to Elzbieta Sklodowska, chair of the romance languages department at Washington University.

Boehm, who translates German and Polish writers, received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2008 to translate “Settlement” by German writer Christoph Hein.

In a story that year, Boehm said he translates two or three books a year along with opinion pieces for The New York Times. For him, the skill is in “recomposing” the work in another language, a process he likened to “taking a script for a play and transposing it into another form.”

On Thursday, he was getting ready to open a  play translated from the Polish. “Helver’s Night” by Ingmar Villqist has its U.S. premiere Friday night at the Kranzberg Arts Center on North Grand Boulevard.