This talk considers how the Romanian-German author Herta Müller has been received around the world as a Nobel Prize winning author following the award in 2009. In so doing, it places Müller into the wider context of literary celebrity as an emerging area of academic enquiry and engages with debates about the cultural and political significance of the Nobel Prize. Outlining how ethically-charged debates about the cultural politics of the Prize have historically evolved on the one hand, and how a certain politically-charged reception has accompanied Müller throughout her career on the other, my talk traces how a highly literary author can become the locus for intrinsically fetishizing public constructions of social value.