Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich was born on 31 May 1948 and is a Belarusian investigative journalist, essayist and oral historian who writes in Russian.
16 Facts About Svetlana Alexievich
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Svetlana Alexievich was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time".
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Svetlana Alexievich is the first writer from Belarus to receive the award.
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Svetlana Alexievich was tried a number of times between 1992 and 1996.
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Svetlana Alexievich named the documentary novel I'm From Fire Village by Ales Adamovich, Janka Bryl and Uladzimir Kalesnik, about the villages burned by the German troops during the occupation of Belarus, as the main single book that has influenced Alexievich's attitude to literature.
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Svetlana Alexievich has confirmed the influence of Adamovich and Belarusian writer Vasil Bykau, among others.
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Svetlana Alexievich was not embedded with the Red Army due to her reputation in the Soviet Union; instead, she travelled to Kabul on her own prerogative during the war and gathered many accounts from veterans returning from Afghanistan.
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In "Boys in Zinc", Svetlana Alexievich calls herself 'a historian of the untraceable' and 'strive[s] desperately to do one thing - reduce history to the human being.
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Svetlana Alexievich's books were not published by Belarusian state-owned publishing houses after 1993, while private publishers in Belarus have only published two of her books: Chernobyl Prayer in 1999 and Second-hand Time in 2013, both translated into Belarusian.
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Svetlana Alexievich has been described as the first journalist to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Svetlana Alexievich herself rejects the notion that she is a journalist, and, in fact, Alexievich's chosen genre is sometimes called "documentary literature": an artistic rendering of real events, with a degree of poetic license.
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On 26 October 2019, Svetlana Alexievich was elected chairman of the Belarusian PEN Center.
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On 9 September 2020, Svetlana Alexievich alerted the press that "men in black masks" were trying to enter her apartment in central Minsk.
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On 28 September 2020, Svetlana Alexievich left Belarus for Germany, promising to return depending on political conditions in Belarus.
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Svetlana Alexievich is a member of the advisory committee of the Lettre Ulysses Award.
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Svetlana Alexievich will give the inaugural Anna Politkovskaya Memorial Lecture at the British Library on 9 October 2019.