Belarusian journalist and author Svetlana Alexievich wins Nobel Prize for

Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich holds flowers as she arrives to attend a news conference in Minsk, Belarus, October 8, 2015. Its standard-size kitchen-which is to say, quite small-is outfitted with a couch, because it’s the room where, in keeping with the Soviet intelligentsia tradition, all the important conversations happen. The book, which was released in English two years later, is not so much about the nuclear disaster as it was about the world after it: how people adapt to a new reality, living as if they had survived a nuclear war. “This will give a positive edge to what she is doing”. The fall-out affected Belarus more than any other country.

The group’s deputy director, Catherine Taylor, said she hoped the Nobel Prize “will further highlight the civil and political injustices in Belarus and go a few way to bringing about the restitution of free speech and freedom of expression for all Belarusians”.

Background: Alexievich is Belarusian, but was born in Ukraine in 1948.

Svetlana Alexievich books are described as a literary chronicle of the emotional history of the Soviet and post-Soviet person. The Swedish Academy, which picks the prestigious literature laureates, has only twice before bestowed the award on non-fiction – to Winston Churchill and Bertrand Russell – and had never honored journalistic work with a Nobel.

“It’s a great personal joy”, she said, saying she was humbled to have joined the ranks of Russian Nobel-winning greats Ivan Bunin and Boris Pasternak.

In a telephone conversation, Alexievich said the award left her with a “complicated” feeling.

She said eight million Swedish krona (£775,000) prize would “buy her freedom”. The resulting book, War’s Unwomanly Face, was long barred from publication but was finally published in 1985 under the perestroika reforms.

Alexievich, 67, began tape-recording accounts of female soldiers who took part in World War II while she was working as a local newspaper reporter in the 1970s. As she writes in her author’s note, Alexievich wrote The Last Witnesses not just to tell those children’s stories but also because “even today someone wants widespread war, a universal Hiroshima, in whose atomic fire children would evaporate like drops of water, wither like awful flowers”.

“She spends years finding and interviewing her subjects, then weaves their testimonies into a polyphonic narrative that immerses the reader with relentless particularity in the individual and the collective experience of existence in the grinding jaws of history”, Human Rights Watch said of her in their profile piece.

Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich has won the Nobel Prize in literature for works that the prize judges called “a monument to suffering and courage”.