Athletes were also among the nominees: Chinese Liu Xiang, back into competition after he suffered an accident at the 2008 Olympic Games and Filipino boxer Manny Pacquio known as 'the national treasure”.

Artists were not forgotten either, some of the nominees being a young and talented Romanian singer, Mihai Traistariu, and also the late king of pop music, Michael Jackson. Another nomination, a symbolic one, was that of the late Romanian journalist, Horia Puşcaşu, who made his début at Radio Romania, and the after the Voice of America's programmes in Romanian were closed, he contributed substantially to the Romanian public radio.

But the person designated to be “The Personality of the Year 2009 on RRI” comes from the cultural world. She is the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature – Romanian born German writer Herta Muller. In her works she depicted people's lives during the totalitarian regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. This is why our listener Paul Jamet from France decided to designate her the Personality of the Year 2009.

She is a writer with a lively, emphatic, accurate and razor-blade style, who turned the tragedy and memory of a country into literary substance, says a Romanian listener from Germany, Brânduşa Massion who also adds that Herta Muller has managed to oppose and condemn Communism living a life without compromise, both in the east and the west.