Svetlana Alexievich
Journalist and oral historian
Svetlana Alexievich is a Belarusian journalist and oral historian who writes in Russian. She won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Born 1948 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine
About Svetlana Alexievich
She was born in Ivano-Frankivsk in 1948 and was raised in Belarus by parents who were both teachers. She trained as a journalist at the University of Minsk, and she worked as a teacher, journalist and editor. After she criticized the Soviet and later Belarusian governments, she spent periods living abroad, including in Italy, France, Germany and Sweden. She developed her own form of nonfiction, gathering many voices together to portray a particular moment in history. Her books include The Unwomanly Face of War, Voices from Chernobyl and Secondhand Time. In 2015 she received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer from Belarus to do so.