Svetlana Alexievich wins Nobel Prize in Literature

Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich is the 2015 Nobel Prize winner in literature. She was commended by the Swedish Academy for “her polyphonic writing, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.�

Alexievich, who lives in Minsk, is known for her close takes on the post-Soviet individual, conducting thousands of interviews for her books. Yet she has also chronicled major events in world history: the accident at Chernobyl, the Soviet engagement in Afghanistan, and World War II as remembered by female veterans.

Books of hers published in America include “War’s Unwomanly Face� and “Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster.�

It’s a major move for the literature award to go to a writer of nonfiction. While past prize-winning authors have worked as journalists, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, they have primarily been known for writing poetry or fiction.

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“The material that she’s offering us -- she’s actually devised a new kind of literary genre -- that speaks to her achievement,� said Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy. “Her literary achievement is material and also form.�

In a past interview, Alexievich described her desire to create her unique narrative form. “I’ve been searching for a literary method that would allow the closest possible approximation to real life. Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, it tortured and hypnotized me, I wanted to capture it on paper,� she explained. “So I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents. This is how I hear and see the world -- as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. This is how my eye and ear function. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realized to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher.�

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