Svetlana Alexievich

Who is Svetlana Alexievich?

Svetlana Alexievich was born in Stanislav, Ukraine, to a Belarusian father and Ukrainian mother, and grew up in Belarus, where she worked as a journalist and schoolteacher before turning to literary nonfiction. She pioneered a distinctive documentary genre built from hundreds of recorded interviews with ordinary people, weaving their testimonies into polyphonic narratives of major twentieth-century traumas. Her books include "The Unwomanly Face of War," based on interviews with Soviet women who served in the Second World War; "Zinky Boys," about the Soviet war in Afghanistan; "Voices from Chernobyl," an oral history of the 1986 nuclear disaster; and "Secondhand Time," documenting the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her outspoken criticism of authoritarianism made her a target of pressure in Belarus, and she lived abroad for over a decade before returning. In 2015 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time," becoming the first writer from Belarus and the first primarily nonfiction writer to receive the prize.

Sources: Nobel Prize official biography and press release, 2015 · Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time (2013) · Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl (1997)