Nobel Prize for Literature Awarded

67-year-old Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich is the victor of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, and the 14th woman to win the award since its inauguration in 1901.

As a journalist she wrote about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, recording the experiences of ordinary soldiers engaged in the proxy war in the already troubled Brezhnev phase of the USSR’s collapse.

She has been awarded 11 global book awards in total, including the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2005 for Voices From Chernobyl.

“She has invented a new literary genre. It’s a true achievement not only in material but also in form”.

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

Born in Ukraine in 1948 to a Ukrainian mother and Belarusian father, Alexievich’s family later moved to Belarus, where she would go on to study journalism at the University of Minsk and then commence her impressive non-fiction writing career.

Alexievich said she was at home “doing the ironing” when the academy called with the news and that she felt “joy and anxiety at the same time: How am I going to keep this up?”

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. “That says a lot about how original she is”.

Speaking about Belarus, she said, “I’m not a barricade person, but time drags us to the barricades, because what’s happening is shameful”.

“We need to have a book where lots of people can make a contribution – one person may speak half a page, someone else may have a paragraph or five pages that they can contribute and that this is a way of conveying what’s going on today”.

Sara Danius says she called Alexievich a few 15 minutes before she announced the victor to the world. It sold more than 2 million copies.

Alexievich’s first book, “I’ve Left My Village”, gave her a reputation as a dissident. “I hope that in reading her, more people see the ways that suffering – even suffering brought on by geopolitical circumstances foreign to many readers – is also something that can bring people closer to one another if they are willing to take a risk and listen”.

In the modern world, she said, it was impossible to write “the book” that encompassed everything in the manner of 19th century novelists. Both parents worked as teachers.

In 1989, she published “Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War”, a book about the war that had been concealed from the Soviet public for 10 years.

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

The economics prize will wrap up this year’s Nobel season on October 12.

“The truth of life in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russian Federation is not an easy thing to swallow”, said her English translator Bela Shayevich.

Donohue said there were no dark horses emerging the week before the expected award announcement.