Alexievich’s work straddles the divide.
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Svetlana Alexievich spoke of her personal joy when she talked to the press.
“I think my voice will carry more weight now….”
Jacques Testard, an editor at Fitzcarraldo, said of Alexievich’s works, “Her books are very unusual and hard to categorise”. She also has written three plays and the screenplays for 21 documentary films. She is the 14th woman to win the award since 1901.
“For the past 30 or 40 years, [Alexievich] has been busy mapping the Soviet and post-Soviet individual”, the Nobel secretary continued. “That would have been enough but on top of that she’s devised a whole new literary genre, one that transcends conventional journalistic formats”. “That says a lot about how original she is”, Ms. Danius added. I can’t speak anywhere publicly.
Alexievich has called the 2011 elections that returned Lukashenko to power “a humanitarian catastrophe for the entire Belarus society”. State TV made only cursory mention of her award on its nightly newscast, nine minutes into the program.
“I am sincerely happy for your success”, he said in a statement. Harry Potter series author JK Rowling, with over 5.6 million Twitter followers, has actively addressed readers through public appearances and social media, revealing much more than we could have imagined when we closed the dust jacket on the final Harry Potter book. “They will have to listen to me”, she said.
“It immediately evokes such great names as (Ivan) Bunin, (Boris) Pasternak”, she said, referring to other Russian writers who have won the Nobel Prize for literature.
For winning the prize however, Alexievich takes home eight million Swedish kronor (around $950,000 or 855,000 euros).
At a book fair in the capital city of Minsk in February 2014, Alexievich was assigned such a tiny room to introduce her newest work, “Second-Hand Time”, that only a few dozen people could be on hand for the occasion.
Born in Belarus – close to the birthplace of another gifted master of reportage, Ryszard Kapuscinski, author of Imperium (1994), a book charting experiences Alexievich understands as part of her past – she is a career journalist who has based her approach on the study of emotions created by and defined through the events of history. After graduating from college, she went on to work for several newspapers where she gained the reputation of a “dissident journalist with anti-Soviet sentiments”.
She has also weighed into the debate over the crisis in Ukraine by praising protesters who ousted Kremlin-backed leader Viktor Yanukovych in February a year ago for trying to shatter the links with the country’s Soviet history. “Together they record verbally the history of the country, their common history, while each person puts into words the story of his/her own life“. The accursed Russian questions: “what is to be done and who is to blame….And this is the theme of my books, this is my path, my circles of hell, from man to man”.
It was awarded France’s prestigious Medicis essai prize in 2013.
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The Nobel committee rarely chooses nonfiction writers for the literature prize. He accepted the award four years later after he was exiled from the Soviet Union.
