Nobel Literature Prize to journalist/writer who gives voice to voiceless

“I thought – how sad that they will never know”, she said of the female WWII soldiers of her book “War’s Unwomanly Face” and the emergency workers who sacrificed themselves after the nuclear catastrophe whose stories she recorded in “Voices from Chernobyl”.

Alexievich also has written three plays and the screenplays for 21 documentary films.

Announcing the prize in Stockholm, the chair of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, called her writing “a monument to courage and suffering in our time”, according toBBC News.

“The message of her works – it’s really a message of humanity and a celebration of those forgotten in history…it’s a powerful message that transcends politics”, he said.

In the Svetoch bookshop, sales assistant Anastasia pointed out Alexievich’s works in the original Russian, which most people in ex-Soviet Belarus speak fluently.

The 67-year-old’s books have been published in 19 countries.

Speaking by phone to Swedish broadcaster SVT, Svetlana Alexievich said winning the Nobel Prize in literature left her with a “complicated” feeling. “It’s as good as Shakespeare”, she said of the quality of the woman’s words when I asked her about that part of the book, years ago.

‘For money I can buy one thing, I buy freedom. Because of this, she lived overseas for 10 years, mostly in Western Europe. She’s also the first from Belarus.

“We see who is leading us – this is the time of a triumph of mediocrity”, she said in a 2013 interview with the newspaper, Belorusskaya Delovaya Gazeta.

“A new national leader has appeared in Belarus, She has more authority now than any politician – the president or a minister”.

“It’s not an award for me but for our culture, for our small country, which has been caught in a grinder throughout history”, she told reporters in Minsk, adding that history showed there was no place for compromise when faced with oppression.

Jacques Testard, an editor at Fitzcarraldo, said of Alexievich’s works, “Her books are very unusual and hard to categorise”.

Read excerpts of Voices from Chernobyl. The prize is worth roughly $970,000.

She had been nominated for the Nobel Prize for many years.

When Alexievich got the call that she had won the Nobel Prize, she reportedly exclaimed, “Fantastic!” “I want to evoke a world not bound by the laws of ordinary verisimilitude, but fashioned in my own image”, she wrote in her 1989 book Zinky Boys. Alexievich spent four years gathering material about the USSR’s last war, even traveling to Afghanistan, but especially about the fear that lurked in all the families with maturing sons: He’ll be drafted, sent to “Afghan” and will return in a zinc coffin.