She is the first journalist to receive the award and the first nonfiction writer to be named in half a century.
Advertisement
“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”.
“If you remove her works from the shelves there would be gaping holes”. “I’m writing a history of human feelings”, she explains on her web site.
“Everyone is quite excited”, he said.
“I love the Russian world, but the kind, humane Russian world”, she added, talking of the country under President Vladimir Putin.
“Alexievich isn’t interested in the problem of Belarussian identity. This will give a positive edge to what she is doing”.
In 1985-2000, Svetlana Alexievich’s books were published by Mastatskaya Litaratura, Yunatstva, Belarus, and other Belarusian publishing houses.
STOCKHOLM – Belarussian writer Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday, honoured for her work chronicling the horrors of war and life under the repressive Soviet regime.
Alexievich has called the 2011 elections that returned Lukashenko to power “a humanitarian catastrophe for the entire Belarus society”.
“She transcends the format of journalism and has developed a new literary genre that bears her trademark”, said Danius. The events she covers, for example, the Chernobyl disaster and the Second World War, are just a pretext for exploring what history does to the individual and where individual life intersects with the course of historical events.
“We see who is leading us – this is the time of a triumph of mediocrity”, she said in a 2013 interview with the newspaper Belorusskaya Delovaya Gazeta.
Asked what she would do with the 8 million Swedish kronor (about $960,000) in Nobel prize money, she said it would allow her to write more.
Alexievich said she has been turned off by Moscow’s aggressive, militaristic rhetoric and policies, including its meddling in Ukraine and the idea that “everything can be solved from the position of force”.
She said another way should be explored to prevent the world from becoming like what she saw after the Chernobyl disaster. “I usually spend three to four years writing a book, but this time it took me more than ten years”.
Alexievich has drawn worldwide acclaim for her moving accounts of Chernobyl, World War II and the war in Afghanistan crafted through thousands of interviews with men, women and children.
She has also weighed into the debate over the crisis in Ukraine by praising protestors who ousted Kremlin-backed leader Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 for trying to shatter the links with the country’s Soviet history.
Every year the academy compiles a secret list of all nominations submitted by an exclusive group of “qualified people”, which includes literature professors and former laureates.
“I take a very long time to write my books from five to ten years”, she told Swedish television after the prize announcement.
Svetlana Alexievich signs books in Minsk, Belarus, at a news…
Advertisement
All awards will be handed out on December 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.
