Belarusian journalist awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

Alexievich, only the 14th woman to win the prize since it was first awarded in 1901, had been the top choice among literary observers and bookies.

Subject matter: She focuses on stories about war, conflict and tragedy, often using the Soviet Union or former Soviet countries as the backdrop.

Danius told Swedish broad-caster SVT that she had contacted Alexievich just before the announcement was made.

She said she was at home “doing chores, I was doing the ironing”, when the academy called her.

The 67-year-old is the first Belarusian writer to win the prestigious prize worth more than US$1 million.

“If you removed her works from the shelves, there would be gaping holes”.

Over the past decade, the academy has regularly conferred the prize on European writers who were not widely read in English, including the French novelist JMG Le Clézio (2008), the Romanian-German writer Herta Müller (2009) and the Swedish poet and translator Tomas Transtromer (2011). “On the one hand, it’s such a fantastic feeling”.

According to The Guardian newspaper, her next book is due out in 2016 and will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. In this book, Alexievich explores the terrible human cost of the catastrophe through the voices of more than 500 eyewitnesses, including firefighters, members of the cleanup team, politicians, physicians, physicists, and ordinary citizens, over 10 years.

Like many intellectuals in Belarus, Alexievich supports the political opponents of authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, who is up for re-election on Sunday.

(Vatican Radio) Free speech advocates have welcomed the decision to award this year’s Nobel Prize in literature to Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich as the writer and investigative journalist is seen as a voice of the voiceless.

“She is offering us new and interesting historical material”. The awards have been given out since 1901. The consequences of the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl 1986 is the topic of Černobyl’skaja molitva (1997; Voices from Chernobyl – Chronicle of the Future, 1999).

“Real people speak in my books about the main events of the age such as the war, the Chernobyl disaster, and the downfall of a great empire”, she said in a biographical text published on her website.

The Swedish Academy insists its selections are based on literary merit alone.

It has been quite a long time since a nonfiction writer won the Nobel.

On Tuesday, the 2015 Nobel Physics prize was awarded to Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Arthur MacDonald of Canada for their discovery of neutrino oscillations, which show that neutrinos – the second-most abundant particles in the universe, next to photons – have mass and change identities.