Great Regulars: The judges, apparently, could not help themselves.

Just two days after a Nobel Prize official worried the literature committee was too "Eurocentric," the winner for 2009 was Herta Mueller, a Romanian-born writer once censored in her native country.

It's no conspiracy, said permanent secretary Peter Englund. It's more geography.

"If you are European (it is) easier to relate to European literature," Englund told The Associated Press after the prize was announced Thursday. "It's the result of psychological bias that we really try to be aware of. It's not the result of any program."

from Hillel Italie: Associated Press: Nobel lit prize goes to little-known European

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