Svetlana Alexievich wins 2015 Nobel

prize in literature
Swedish Academy praises Belarusian writers work as a monument to
suffering in our time
The news and reaction as it happened
Everything you need to know about Svetlana Alexievich: an introduction
Her life and career, in pictures

Object 1

Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, calls Alexeivich an extraordinary writer.

Alison Flood, Luke Hardingand agencies-Thursday 8

October 2015

The Swedish Academy, announcing her win, praised Alexievichs

polyphonic writings, describing them as a monument to suffering
and courage in our time.

Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian writer whose oral histories have

recorded thousands of individual voices to map the implosion of the
Soviet Union, has won the Nobel prize for literature.

She becomes the 14th woman to win the prize since it was first
awarded in 1901. The last woman to win, Canadas Alice Munro,
was handed the award in 2013.
Speaking by phone to the Swedish broadcaster SVT, Svetlana

Alexievich said that the award left her with a complicated feeling.

It immediately evokes such great names as [Ivan] Bunin, [Boris]

Pasternak, she said, referring to Russian writers who have won the
prize. On the one hand, its such a fantastic feeling, but its also a bit
disturbing.

The academy called while she was at home, doing the ironing, she
said, adding that the 8m Swedish krona (775,000) prize would buy
her freedom.
It takes me a long time to write my books, from five to 10 years. I
have two ideas for new books so Im pleased that I will now have the
freedom to work on them.
Alexievich was born on the 31 May 1948 in the Ukrainian town of
Ivano-Frankovsk into a family of a serviceman. Her father is Belarusian
and her mother is Ukrainian. After her fathers demobilisation from the
army the family returned to his native Belorussia and settled in a
village where both parents worked as schoolteachers. She left school
to work as a reporter on the local paper in the town of Narovl.

She has written short stories, essays and reportage but says she
found her voice under the influence of the Belorusian writer Ales
Adamovich, who developed a genre which he variously called the
collective novel, novel-oratorio, novel-evidence, people talking
about themselves and the epic chorus.
According to Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish
Academy, Alexeivich is an extraordinary writer.

For the past 30 or 40 years shes been busy mapping the Soviet and

post soviet individual, Danius said, but its not really about a history
of events. Its a history of emotions what shes offering us is really
an emotional world, so these historical events shes covering in her
various books, for example the Chernobyl disaster, the Soviet war in
Afghanistan, these are in a way just pretexts for exploring the Soviet
individual and the post-Soviet individual.
Shes conducted thousands and thousands of interviews with
children, with women and with men, and in this way shes offering us

a history of human beings about whom we didnt know that much ...
and at the same time shes offering us a history of emotions, a history
of the soul.

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 thats not a person
anymore, thats a nuclear reactor to the soldiers sent in to help,
angry at being flung ... there, like sand on the reactor. In Zinky
Boys, she gathers voices from the Afghan war: soldiers, doctors,
widows and mothers.
I dont ask people about socialism, I ask about love, jealousy,
childhood, old age, Alexievich writes in the introduction to Secondhand Time, which is due from independent publisher Fitzcarraldo
Editions in 2016. Music, dances, hairstyles. The myriad sundry details
of a vanished way of life. This is the only way to chase the catastrophe
into the framework of the mundane and attempt to tell a story.

It never ceases to amaze me how interesting ordinary, everyday life

is. There are an endless number of human truths History is only

interested in facts; emotions are excluded from its realm of interest.
Its considered improper to admit them into history. I look at the world
as a writer, not strictly an historian. I am fascinated by people.

Danius pointed new readers towards her first book U vojny ne enskoe
lico (Wars Unwomanly Face), based on interviews with hundreds of
women who participated in the second world war.

Its an exploration of the second world war from a perspective that

was, before that book, almost completely unknown, she said. It tells
the story of the hundreds and hundreds of women who were at the
front in the second world war. Almost one million Soviet women
participated in the war, and its a largely unknown history. It was a
huge success in the Soviet Union union when published, and sold
more than 2m copies. Its a touching document and at the same time
brings you very close to every individual, and in a few years they all

will be gone.

According to her close friend, the Belarusian opposition leader Andrei

Sannikov, Alexeivich writes about the history of the Red Man.

She claims he is not gone, Sannikov said. She argues that this man

is inside us, inside every Soviet person. Her last book, Second-hand
Time, is dedicated to this problem. Alexeivich is wonderful at
interviewing he continued. She doesnt avoid difficult issues or
questions. Mostly she writes about human tragedy. She lets it go
through her and writes with surgical precision about whats going on
within human nature.

Bela Shayevich, who is currently translating Alexievich into English for

Fitzcarraldo, also paid tribute to her skills as an interviewer which
leave her work resounding with nothing but the truth.

The truth of life in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia is not an
easy thing to swallow, Shayevich said. Im thrilled that this win will
mean that more readers will be exposed to the metaphysical
dimensions of her subjects survival and despair through the tragedies
of Soviet history. 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.
Although Alexievich is widely translated into German, French and
Swedish, winning a range of major prizes for her work, English editions
of her work are sparse. Fitzcarraldo editor Jacques Testard came
across her work in French a few years ago.

Its an oral history, as are all her books, about nostalgia for the Soviet

Union, said Testard. She went around Russia interviewing people

after the fall of the Soviet Union, in an attempt to surmise what the
collective post Soviet psyche is. As with all her books, its really
harrowing a story about loss of identity, about finding yourself in a
country which you dont recognise any more. Its a micro-historical

survey of Russia in the second half of the 20th century, and it goes up
to the Putin years.

Shes been a big deal in Europe for a long time, but shes never really

been picked up in England, he said.

Her books are very unusual and difficult to categorise. Theyre

technically non-fiction, but English and American publishers are loath

to take risks on a book just because its good, without something like
a Nobel prize.

Alexievich led the odds for the 2015 award, ahead of Japans Haruki
Murakami, Kenyas Ngg wa Thiongo and the Norwegian playwright
Jon Fosse.
Posted by Thavam