Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Aleksandrovna Alexievich is a Belarusian writer, journalist, and documentary screenwriter. The first Belarusian and sixth Russian-language laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature (2015). Her best-known books are in the genre of fiction and documentary prose: “The Unwomanly Face of War”, “Zinc Boys”, “Chernobyl Prayer”, “Second Hand Time”. Alexievich’s works are dedicated to the life of the late USSR and the post-Soviet era, and are imbued with feelings of compassion and humanism. Svetlana Alexievich works in the fiction and documentary genre. Masha Gessen calls her “the keeper of memory”. All of S. Alexievich’s books are based on many hours of interviews with people who experienced some difficult event or with their surviving relatives and friends. Each book takes five to seven years to write.

Alexievich’s first published book, The Unwomanly Face of War, was written in 1983. This documentary novel, based on interviews with Soviet women who fought in the Great Patriotic War, was first published in the magazine Oktyabr in early 1984. The book, whose heroines were nurses, pilots, snipers, translators, doctors, and radio operators, reflects the specific female experience of war. Some information was deleted from the book by censors (who accused the author of pacifism, naturalism, and debunking the heroic image of Soviet women); many of these omissions were restored in later editions. In 2015, Alexievich was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, with the wording “for her polyphonic work — a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”

Svetlana Alexievich is the first Nobel laureate in the history of independent Belarus; she became the first Russian-language writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature since 1987. For the first time in half a century, the prize was awarded to a writer primarily working in the genre of non-fiction; and for the first time in history, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to a professional journalist.

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