Svetlana Alexievich is a Belarusian non-fiction writer, investigative journalist, and oral historian who writes in Russian and works in various literary genres, including short stories, essays, and reportage. She is the first writer from Belarus to receive the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”
Alexievich was born in 1948 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, to a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother. She grew up and spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, where she studied journalism and worked as a reporter and teacher. As a journalist, she moved within the boundary between reporting and fiction and developed her own non-fiction genre that gathers a chorus of voices to describe particular dramatic historical moments (the Second World War, the Afghan War, the Chernobyl disaster, and the demise of the Soviet Union). Her “documentary novels” constitute “a living history” and “the closest possible approximation to real life.” Alexievich’s criticism of the political regimes in both the Soviet Union and later Belarus, along with her political activism, often forced her to live abroad. Her works include War’s Unwomanly Face (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Zinky Boys (1990), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand Time (2013).
