Who is Svetlana Alexievich, victor of 2015 Nobel Prize in literature?

“She’s offering us a history of emotions, a history of the soul if you wish”, Darius said.

Like many intellectuals in Belarus, Alexievich supports the political opponents of authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, who is up for re-election on Sunday. In 2000 Alexievich fled Belarus and moved to Paris, spending a decade overseas, after the global Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN) offered her sanctuary.

The honor will likely open up Alexievich’s writing to a much wider audience than already enjoys it, leading potentially to a better understanding of the world, closed to outsiders, that she and her subjects inhabited throughout her early life.

In an interview with Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily, Alexievich was quoted as saying: “I write only in Russian and see myself as a part of Russian culture”. It sold more than 2 million copies. When she completed “The Unwomanly Face of the War”, in 1983, she was accused of the “de-glorification of the heroic Soviet woman”. She has written essays, short stories, and reportage. The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel will be awarded on October 12. “But it’s also a bit disturbing”. She said the work is a “a large, thick book that is based on hundreds of deep interviews with female participants in the Second World War, in the Red Army”.

“I have two ideas for new books so I’m pleased that I will now have the freedom to work on them”. She worked at newspapers near the Polish border and in Minsk while collecting material for her books.

In 2005 she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her book Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster and in 2013 she was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association.

Her 1993 book “Enchanted with Death” focused on attempted suicides resulting from the downfall of communism, as people who felt inseparable from socialist ideals were unable to accept a new world order.

She is only the 14th woman to win the prize, which has been awarded 107 times.

When Permanent Secretary Sara Darius broke the good news to the “overjoyed” writer, Darius said she had just one word to say in response, “fantastic”.

Alexievich’s documentary style of writing first became popular in the former Soviet Union in the 1980s. The oldest victor was Doris Lessing, who was 88 when she won the prize in 2007.