Svetlana Alexievich wins 2015 Nobel Prize in literature

The Belarusian journalist has penned many stories, essays and reportage on “suffering and courage” in her stint of around 40 years in reporting.

Alexievich was born on 31 May 1948 in a Ukrainian town called Ivano-Frankovsk. Her father is Belarusian and mother a Ukrainian. She gave up schooling just in a bid to pursue reporting in a local paper.

The permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Sara Danius has heaped praise on the Nobel Prize winner. She says, “For the past 30 or 40 years she’s been busy mapping the Soviet and post soviet individual,” Danius said, “but it’s not really about a history of events. It’s a history of emotions – what she’s offering us is really an emotional world, so these historical events she’s 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.”

“She’s conducted thousands and thousands of interviews with children, with women and with men, and in this way she’s offering us a history of human beings about whom we didn’t know that much ... and at the same time she’s offering us a history of emotions, a history of the soul.”