She also has written three plays and screenplays for 21 documentary films. She is the first journalist to receive the award and the first nonfiction writer to be named in half a century.
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In announcing the award, the Swedish Academy said she won “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”. At the same time she’s offering us a history of emotions.
“They pretend I don’t exist”, she said.
Her investigative journalism would eventually earn her the ire of Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko – a man believed to harbor a fondness for Adolf Hitler – whose brutal crackdown on dissidence saw countless journalists, opposition politicians and activists imprisoned. “I am not published (in Belarus) and I can not speak publicly anywhere. Others have been there too but she expanded it”, Danius said. Alexievich made no illusions: she was going to toe no one else’s line.
Alexievich was the bookmakers’ favourite to win the award, according to Ladbrokes.
The Nobel Prize for Medicine for this year was won by Irish-born William Campbell of US, Satoshi Omura of Japan, and Youyou Tu of China on Monday. “On the one hand, it’s such a fantastic feeling”.
“The 8 million-Swedish-crown ($972,000) literature prize was the fourth of this year’s Nobel prizes”.
In an interview with Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily, Alexievich was quoted as saying: “I write only in Russian and see myself as a part of Russian culture”. “I’m writing a history of human feelings”, she explains on her web site.
‘I have two new ideas for two new books, so I am glad that I will be free now to work on them’.
Her family later moved to Belarus, where both her parents worked as teachers.
Apparently caught by surprise by the news in her tiny Minsk flat, Alexievich hastily called a press conference at the offices of a local newspaper.
“So”, Danius added, “these historical events that’s she’s sort of covering in her various [ways] – the Chernobyl disaster, the Soviet war in Afghanistan and so on – these are, in a way, just pretext for exploring the Soviet individual and the post-Soviet individual”. Alexievich is the author of, among other books, “Voices from Chernobyl”, about the survivors of the nuclear plant disaster in Ukraine in 1986. The Swedish Academy says it makes its choices only on literary merit and doesn’t consider politics. But its decisions have often sparked political reactions, particularly during the Cold War. She becomes the 112 writer to be bestowed the prestigious award. The Nobel Prize will be given on December 10, 2015 (death ceremony of Swedish Chemist of Alfred Nobel).
Americans don’t have a very acute sense of the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan that lasted from 1979-89, but as Alexievich demonstrates here, its psychological impact was akin to the Vietnam War’s on America.
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The academy has also honored writers who were viewed favorably by Soviet leaders, including Mikhail Sholokhov in 1965.
