Frankfurt  - Herta Mueller, winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature, wept Wednesday as she remembered a fellow ethnic German poet from Romania who collaborated with her on her latest book.

Mueller was picked last week for the prize for a body of books which deal with oppression and suffering under communism in Romania. Her latest book describes the ordeal of a 17-year-old German boy dragged off by the Soviets in 1945 to a famine-ridden camp.

The account is largely based on the notes of Oskar Pastior, who, before his sudden death in 2006, took Mueller on a visit to the ruins of the gulag where he was incarcerated in Ukraine.

They had planned to write the book, titled Atemschaukel in German, together.

"It's so sad that I have to sit here alone," Mueller, 56, told a Frankfurt Book Fair audience as tears welled up in her eyes. "I have so much to thank him for."

Her publisher said she had been suffering from a cold when she cancelled an appointment in another city Tuesday, and was exhausted after the excitement last week, but she appeared fit again Wednesday.

Mueller said she had been so upset at Pastior's sudden death that she stopped work on their book.

"I couldn't bear to be near the notes," she said. But after about nine months, "I accepted that I was going to have to do this alone."

She described how, when the two Romanian-born writers revisited the former labour camp, poet Pastior gorged himself on food, although he was diabetic and normally extremely careful about his diet.

"He said that he did it to honour the food," she recalled. The book describes the daily delusions of the German inmates as they try to evade death by starvation in the Soviet camp.  dpa