Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich wins 2015 Nobel Prize in literature

Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich has been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the Stockholm-based Nobel Committee announced this Thursday morning.

Alexievich will receive her award at the Nobel ceremony on December 10; several of her books, including Voices From Chernobyl, are available online.

Writers’ free-speech group English PEN called Nobel literature laureate Alexievich “a tireless chronicler of voices which might not otherwise be heard”, and said it hoped her victory would encourage the Belarus government to improve its human rights record.

This video includes images from Getty Images. At the same time, she has spoken about feeling increasingly alienated from what used to be her intellectual community inside Russian Federation, which has now, she says, thrown itself into that country’s new imperial project.

Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich is the 2015 Nobel Prize victor in literature. “If Flaubert said ‘I am a man of the pen – or the plume, ‘ I could say of myself that I am a person of the ear”.

The Academy s permanent secretary Sara Danius hailed Alexievich as “an extraordinary writer”.

Alexievich said she has been turned off by Moscow’s aggressive, militaristic rhetoric and policies, including its meddling in Ukraine and the idea that “everything can be solved from the position of force”.

The daughter of two village schoolteachers, Alexievich studied journalism in Belarus, which at the time was part of the Soviet Union. Her first book was about women’s experiences during World War II; another major book focused on Soviet soldiers sent to fight in Afghanistan, and another is on the Chernobyl nuclear accident and its consequences. Other prize winners include Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison. Cinkovye mal’čiki(1990; Zinky Boys – Soviet voices from a forgotten war, 1992) is a portrayal of the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan 1979-89, and her work Vremja second chènd (2013; “Second-hand Time: The Demise of the Red (Wo)man”) is the latest in “Voices of Utopia”.

But her books, controversially written in Russian, are not published in her home country, long ruled by authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, amid what the author has described as “a creeping censorship”. “Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, it tortured and hypnotized me, I wanted to capture it on paper”, she explained.

The prize is named after dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel and has been awarded since 1901 for achievements in science, literature, and peace in accordance with his will.