Alexievich wins Nobel Prize
BELARUSSIAN writer Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Literature Prize yesterday, honoured for her work chronicling the horrors of war and life under the repressive Soviet regime.
BELARUSSIAN writer Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Literature Prize yesterday, honoured for her work chronicling the horrors of war and life under the repressive Soviet regime.
The Swedish Academy hailed the 67year-old for writings that were “a monument to suffering and courage in our time” — tableaux of the Second World War, Chernobyl and the war in Afghanistan, crafted through thousands of interviews.
“By means of her extraordinary method — a carefully composed collage of human voices — Alexievich deepens our comprehension of an entire era,” the academy said.
Ms Alexievich dedicated the prize to her native Belarus. “It’s not an award for me but for our culture, for our small country, which has been caught in a grinder throughout history.”
In separate comments to the daily Svenska Dagbladet, she said the prize would help the fight for freedom of expression in Belarus and Russia.
“I think my voice will carry more weight now…. It won’t be so easy for those in power to dismiss me with a wave of the hand anymore. They will have to listen to me,” she said.
Speaking to the Nobel Foundation, the academy’s permanent secretary, Sara Danius, called her “an extraordinary writer”, saying “it’s a history of emotions she’s offering us”.
Ms Alexievich has seen her works translated into numerous languages and scoop several international awards. But her books, controversially written in Russian, are not published in her home country amid what the author has described as “a creeping censorship”.
She began tape recording accounts of female soldiers who took part in the Second World War while she was working as a local newspaper reporter in the 1970s. The resulting book, War’s Unwomanly Face, was long barred from publication but was finally published in 1985 under the perestroika reforms.
Ms Alexievich later used the same technique of first-person testimonies to document the despair of mothers who lost their sons in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan — in Zinky Boys.
In 1998, she published Voices From Chernobyl, a collection of horrifying accounts from people who had worked on the nuclear clean-up of the 1986 disaster.