Until she won the Nobel Prize in literature last year, Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich was largely unknown in the English- and Russian-speaking worlds. After beginning her career as a reporter, she has spent the past three decades working at the boundary of journalism and literature. Her books, which she calls “novels in voices,” are based on hundreds of interviews with ordinary citizens about some of the most painful episodes of the twentieth century: World War II, Chernobyl, the Soviet war in Afghanistan. She uses the voices of witnesses, interspersed with her own reflections, to express the collective trauma of world-historical events.

SECONDHAND TIME: THE LAST OF THE SOVIETS by Svetlana Alexievich Random House, 496 pp., $30

A pacifist opposed to Vladimir Putin, Alexievich was the perfect Nobel laureate for a new Cold War, as tensions between Russia and the West reached the highest levels in decades. Born in Ukraine in 1948 and raised in Belarus, Alexievich stood for post-Soviet people struggling nonviolently against Putin’s Russia, which many considered a new incarnation of the Soviet Union. In her Nobel lecture, Alexievich expressed a low opinion of the Soviet era’s utopian dreams:

I reconstruct the history … of how people wanted to build the Heavenly Kingdom on earth. Paradise! The City of the Sun! In the end, all that remained was a sea of blood, millions of ruined human lives.

In post-Nobel interviews, she criticized Putin and his involvement in the war in eastern Ukraine. Members of the Russian opposition were pleased; some mainstream Russian commentators denounced her Nobel selection as a political statement.

American journalists found their own reasons to celebrate her win. She was a woman writing about the effect of world events on ordinary people; she was an outspoken advocate for peace and respect for the environment. Since the Nobel Prize goes almost exclusively to novelists and poets, writers working in the sprawling, ill-defined world of “nonfiction” welcomed Alexievich’s win as an acknowledgment that even true stories can make great literature.

There was some confusion, however, about the lineaments of Alexievich’s chosen genre. The Western press described her as an “investigative journalist” and “contemporary historian,” accepting her work as accurate documentation of Soviet and post-Soviet reality. In interviews, however, Alexievich has stressed the literary nature of her intentions and methods, and she rejects the title of “reporter.” Her work opts for subjective recollection over hard evidence; she does not attempt to confirm any of her witnesses’ accounts, and she chooses her stories for their narrative power, not as representative samples. Her newly translated book Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets bears no resemblance to “investigative journalism.”