The winner of the 2015 Nobel prize in literature, Svetlana Alexievich, is an unfamiliar name to many English-speaking readers. But her work has given voice to survivors of conflict and disaster all over the former Soviet Union, shedding light into the emotional lives of people she has met from Chernobyl to Kabul. Here are some key facts about her life and work. If you have read her, we’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Who is she?

This is how I hear and see the world – as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details

Alexievich was born 31 May 1948 in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankovsk into the family of a serviceman. Her father is Belarusian and her mother is Ukrainian. After her father’s 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 went on to a career in journalism, and has written short stories and reportage, in which she’s covered the Chernobyl catastrophe, the Soviet war in Afghanistan and many other events – all based on thousands of interviews with witnesses.

She has been persecuted by Alexander Lukashenko’s dictatorial regime, which made her leave Belarus in 2000. She went on to live in Paris, Gothenburg and Berlin, and could only return to Minsk in 2011.

What does the Swedish Academy say about her?

Alexievich has been given the award “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time,” in the words of the judges. Permanent secretary Sara Danius paid tribute to the power of her work.

For the past 30 or 40 years she’s been busy mapping the Soviet and post-Soviet individual. But it’s not really a history of events. It’s a history of emotions. What she’s offering us is really an emotional world. So these historical events that she’s covering in her various books – for example the Chernobyl disaster or the Soviet war in Afghanistan – are, in a way, just pretexts for exploring the soviet individual and the post soviet individual. She’s conducted thousands of interviews with children, women and men, and in this way she’s offering us a history of a human being about whom we didn’t know that much.”

What are her writing style and literary influences?

She says in her blog that 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 “epic chorus”.

In an interview, she said: “I’ve been searching for a literary method that would allow the closest possible approximation to real life. Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, it tortured and hypnotised me, I wanted to capture it on paper. So I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents. This is how I hear and see the world – as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. This is how my eye and ear function. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realised to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher.”

Where should the English-speaking reader start?



War’s Unwomanly Face (1985)

Alexievich interviewed hundreds out of the million Russian women who participated in the second world war in a variety of roles, including as foot soldiers, snipers, doctors and nurses. From the book’s blurb: “All that we know about Woman is best described by the word ‘compassion’. There are other words, too – sister, wife, friend and, the noblest of all, mother. But isn’t compassion a part of all these concepts, their very substance, their purpose and their ultimate meaning? A woman is the giver of life, she safeguards life, so ‘Woman’ and ‘life’ are synonyms.”

Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy Sara Danius Danius recommends readers start with this: “It brings you very close to every single individual.”



Zinky Boys: The Record of a Lost Soviet Generation (1992)



This account of the Soviet war in Afghanistan takes its title from the name given to the corpses of young men sent home from the conflict, as they always were put in zinc coffins. From Julia R Robin Whitby, the English translator: “The men and women who express their thoughts and experiences in these pages need no introduction – they must speak for themselves. The confusion and contradictions displayed by some are as revealing as the honesty and insight of others. As we listen to them, however, we need to bear in mind certain aspects of Soviet life with no immediate parallel in the West.” “Sometimes unreadably sad,” said John Lloyd in the London Review of Books.

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (2006)



On April 26 1986, the number four reactor at the Chernobyl power station blew apart. Facing nuclear disaster on an unprecedented scale, Soviet authorities tried to contain the situation by sending thousands of ill-equipped men into a radioactive maelstrom. In this book, Alexievich explores the terrible human cost of the catastrophe through the voices of more than 500 eyewitnesses, including firefighters, members of the cleanup team, politicians, physicians, physicists, and ordinary citizens, over 10 years.

Read an extract here – and some more of the gripping testimonies here



Second-hand Time (due in English 2016)

And on to the collapse of the USSR. Second-hand Time is being translated by Bela Shayevich. Fitzcarraldo Editions, Alexievich’s UK publisher, says: “In this magnificent requiem to a civilization in ruins, the author of Voices from Chernobyl reinvents a singular, polyphonic literary form, bringing together the voices of dozens of witnesses to the collapse of the USSR in a formidable attempt to chart the disappearance of a culture and to surmise what new kind of man may emerge from the rubble.”

A short film based on her Chernobyl book was nominated for an Academy Award

Irish director Juanita Wilson directed a short film based on Voices from Chernobyl, which was nominated for an Oscar in 2010. Watch it here:

Further reading

Photograph: Archive of Svetlana Alexievich

Have you already read Alexievich, in whatever language? Do let us know your thoughts in the comments.