“That would have been enough but on top of that she’s devised a whole new literary genre, one that transcends conventional journalistic formats”.
Advertisement
Alexievich spent several years living outside Belarus after criticizing the country’s authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, who is up for re-election on Sunday. She lived in exile overseas for many years, including in Sweden, Germany and France, due to her criticism of the Belarus government.
In a past interview, Alexievich described her desire to create her unique narrative form. “In 2015, Svetlana Alexievich also met with her readers and held a presentation of her books as part of the fair”, the ministry said.
In separate comments to the daily Svenska Dagbladet, she said the prize would help the fight for freedom of expression in Belarus and Russian Federation.
Scheduled to be published in October 2016, that date will most likely be brought forward to meet public demand.
Alexievich said she did not plan to vote, but offered a qualified endorsement of Tatiana Karatkevich, the nearest thing to an opposition candidate.
“I think nobody loves the truth”. I love the Russian people.
Can I read her books in English? It was repeatedly reprinted and sold out in more than two million copies.
Ms Alexievich said the win left her with a “complicated” feeling.
The 67-year old Alexievich is the 14th woman to win the literature prize and one of the first whose work is mainly nonfiction. “But it’s also a bit disturbing”.
She said she is going to use the prize money, 8m Swedish krona (€860,000) to buy her freedom to write. “I take a very long time to write my books, from five to ten years”, she told Swedish television after the prize announcement.
Born in Ukraine in 1948 to a Ukrainian mother and Belarusian father, Alexievich’s family later moved to Belarus, where she would go on to study journalism at the University of Minsk and then commence her impressive non-fiction writing career.
Alexievich’s “fundamental project is to uncover the Russian soul”, Jacques Testard, publisher of Fitzcarraldo Editions, which will release Second Hand Time, an oral history about nostalgia for the Soviet Union in the United Kingdom in May 2016. She worked at newspapers near the Polish border and in Minsk while collecting material for her books.
For her works Voices of Chernobyl and War’s Unwomanly Face, Alexievich gathered hundreds of interview subjects to explore the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan, and the experience of Soviet women who were on the front lines during World War II.
“It is occupation, a foreign invasion,” she said at a news conference in Minsk, adding that she wept when she saw photographs of those killed during pro-European street protests in the Ukrainian capital a year ago.
Advertisement
In 1997, Alexievich published “Voices from Chernobyl: Chronicle of the Future”.
