Svetlana Alexievich Wins 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature

A journalist, playwright and screenwriter, Alexievich’s oeuvre is dominated by her intrepid and beautifully researched works of non-fiction.

“I have two ideas for new books so I’m pleased that I will now have the freedom to work on them”. “I take a very long time to write my books, from five to ten years”, she told Swedish television after the prize announcement. “That says a lot about how original she is”, said Danius.

“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.

Her first book, “War’s Unwomanly Face”, published in 1985, was based on the previously untold stories of women who had fought against Nazi Germany. It was a huge success in the Soviet Union union when published, and sold more than 2m copies.

“It’s a true achievement not only in material but also in form”, she said.

Alexievich dedicated the prize to her native Belarus. She is the fourteenth female to win the Nobel Prize for Literature since 1901. “But it’s also a bit disturbing”.

“By means of her extraordinary method – a carefully composed collage of human voices – Alexievich deepens our comprehension of an entire era”, the academy said while announcing the prize of 8 million Swedish kronor (around $960,000) in Stockholm. “For money I can buy one thing, I buy freedom”.

Her most recent book “Second-Hand Time” – a non-fiction work examining the legacy of the Soviet mentality over 20 years after the collapse of Communism – scooped France’s prestigious Prix Medicis essai in 2013.

Scheduled to be published in October 2016, that date will most likely be brought forward to meet public demand.

Alexievich was born in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankivsk to a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother.

Alexievich has seen her works translated into numerous languages and has scooped several worldwide awards.

“So”, Danius added, “these historical events that’s she’s sort of covering in her various [ways] – the Chernobyl disaster, the Soviet war in Afghanistan and so on – these are, in a way, just pretext for exploring the Soviet individual and the post-Soviet individual”. The book is the first in a grand cycle, “Voices of Utopia”, that depicted life in the Soviet Union from the point of view of ordinary citizens.

In Voices From Chernobyl, Alexievich interviews hundreds of those affected by the nuclear disaster, from a woman holding her dying husband despite being told by nurses that “that’s not a person anymore, that’s a nuclear reactor” to the soldiers sent in to help, angry at being “flung … there, like sand on the reactor”.

The permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy says this year’s victor of the Nobel Prize in literature has developed “a new literary genre”.

Nobel literature prizes have often sparked political reactions, particularly during the Cold War. It has been awarded over the years to worldwide literary giants like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Albert Camus and Toni Morrison, as well as to more obscure authors.

She has also weighed into the debate over the crisis in Ukraine by praising protestors who ousted Kremlin-backed leader Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 for trying to shatter the links with the country’s Soviet history.