Berlin  - Herta Mueller, 56, the Romanian-born German writer, told reporters Thursday she was still having trouble getting used to the notion that she has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

At a crowded Berlin news conference, Mueller revealed that she had gone into hiding in her home in the German capital, refusing to answer reporters' rings of the doorbell or the telephone, after receiving the phone call from Stockholm telling her she had won.

"I think I still need some more time to make sense of it," she said shyly. "I tell myself it's not me. It's my books, which have their own existence. They are the actual 'persons' that got the prize."

Mueller described her body of novels, short stories and poetry, inspired by the first 30 years of her life which she spent under the brutal Romanian regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, as being a witness against all dictatorships.

"You can also count the Nazi regime, the concentration camps, military dictatorships and the religious dictatorships in some Islamic countries," she said. "So many people are crushed by them, so many lives ruined."

Mueller, who left Romania in 1987, less than three years before the Ceausescu dictatorship was overthrown at the end of 1989, said she had been happy when that happened, but sad for her friends who had not survived.

"It's terrible for the people who will never come back to us," she said.  dpa