Belarusian Writer Svetlana Alexievich wins the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature

“By means of her extraordinary method – a carefully composed collage of human voices – Alexievich deepens our comprehension of an entire era”, the Swedish Academy said on Thursday in awarding the 8 million crown ($972,000) prize.

Svetlana Alexievich was named the 2015 Nobel Laureate in literature on Thursday, earning a new level of global fame and exposure for her work.

At a news conference in Minsk, the writer said Belarusian authorities simply pretend she doesn’t exist.

Here’s a brief introduction to know about the author, whose “polyphonic writings” were dubbed “a monument to courage and suffering in our time” by Sara Danius, the Nobel chair, when the prize was announced. “And this is the theme of my books, this is my path, my circles of hell, from man to man”.

Indeed, Alexievich has been polarizing in the region since her earliest days; her first book, “War’s Unwomanly Face”, was banned in the Soviet Union during the Gorbachev years. “I usually spend three to four years writing a book, but this time it took me more than ten years”. “I have two ideas for new books, so I’m pleased that I will now have the freedom to work on them”.

Alexievich, born in 1948 in Ukraine, worked as a teacher and a journalist after finishing school. So these historical events that she’s covering in her various books – for example the Chernobyl disaster or the Soviet war in Afghanistan – are, in a way, just pretexts for exploring the soviet individual and the post soviet individual. “I’ve been searching for a genre that would be most adequate to my vision of the world to convey how my ear hears and my eyes see life”, she writes on her website.

In 1997, Alexievich published “Voices from Chornobyl: Chronicle of the Future”.

For that work, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people touched by the massive 1986 nuclear meltdown, which spread radioactivity on the wind across much of Eastern Europe. But its decisions have often sparked political reactions, particularly during the Cold War.

Last year’s award went to French author Patrick Modiano.

Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn also didn’t come to Stockholm after he won the Nobel literature prize in 1970, fearing that Soviet authorities wouldn’t let him back in.

The academy has also honoured writers who were viewed favourably by Soviet leaders, including Mikhail Sholokhov in 1965.

The announcements of the science awards are over and now the Nobel Prize spotlight turns to literature.

All awards will be given out during a ceremony on 10 December which is the anniversary of the prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death.

(This version corrects spelling of town to Ivano-Frankivst).