Svetlana Alexievich of Belarus wins Nobel literature prize

Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich, known for chronicling the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature Thursday “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”.

“It’s very important to listen when someone is speaking up”.

She is only the 14th woman to get the distinction since the first prize was awarded in 1901. It was finally published in 1985 under the perestroika reforms.

“For the past 30 or 40 years, she has been busy mapping the Soviet and post-Soviet individual”, Danius said.

“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”, Alexievich explained.

Alexievich’s first book, “I’ve Left My Village”, gave her a reputation as a dissident. “I’ve been searching for a genre that would be most adequate to my vision of the world to convey how my ear hears and my eyes see life”, she writes on her website.

When Permanent Secretary Sara Darius broke the good news to the “overjoyed” writer, Darius said she had just one word to say in response, “fantastic”.

Nobelprize.org’s Julia Chayka spoke to Alexievich over the phone before she headed out to a press conference in Minsk, Belarus.

The half century which followed her birth made her the witness to seminal events which shaped the world we know today: the nuclear arms race, the ideological conflicts between what was called capitalism and what called itself communism, and many proxy wars in service of this ideological stand-off between the West and the East. The demise of this world was as unforeseen as it was quick. Alexievich confronted the consequences directly, and her book, Voices from Chernobyl, insists on the necessity of acknowledging ordinary people’s experiences of the vicissitudes of history’s larger political sweeps.

“By means of her extraordinary method – a carefully composed collage of human voices – Alexievich deepens our comprehension of an entire era”, it said.

“Russian television perverts people”. The only thing that pains me is, why haven’t we learned from all this suffering? “The Belarussian language is very rural and immature as literature”.

Danius adds she is very pleased that Alexievich has won the prize, calling her work “absolutely brilliant”.

The outspoken writer has also condemned the growing domination of socially conservative and Orthodox Christian beliefs in Russian Federation.

‘A path of her own’.