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Svetlana Alexievich awarded 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature

Belarusian journalist and author Svetlana Alexievich has been awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for ‘her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time’. Alexievich was born in the Ukraine and moved to Belarus as a child, later graduating from the University of Minsk. While working as a journalist Alexievich collected material for her first book, which is translated as War’s Unwomanly Face (trans by Keith Hammon & Lyudmila Lezhneva, Progress Publishers), the first in her ‘Voices of Uptopia’ book cycle, in which life in the Soviet Union is ‘depicted from the perspective of the individual’. Her Nobel Prize biography notes that ‘by means of her extraordinary method—a carefully composed collage of human voices—Alexievich deepens our comprehension of an entire era’. Five of Alexievich’s books have been translated from Russian to English, the most recent being Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (trans by Keith Gessen, Dalkey Archive Press), which was published in 2005.

 

Category: International news