Her books include “Voices from Chernobyl – Chronicle of the Future”, and “Zinky Boys – Soviet voices from a forgotten war”, a portrayal of the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan. “The Belarussian language is very rural and immature as literature”. “She transcends journalistic formats and has pressed ahead with a genre that others have helped create”, Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said in conjunction with the October 8 announcement.
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‘She has invented a new literary genre. “I do not love Beria, Stalin, Putin… how low they let Russian Federation sink”, she said, referring to the former Soviet leader and his head of the secret police. “I am not published (in Belarus) and I can not speak publicly anywhere”.
Background: Alexievich is Belarusian, but was born in Ukraine in 1948. I love the Russian people.
The Belarusian journalist was awarded the prize by the Swedish Academy Thursday.
Lukashenko has shown signs that he’s trying to improve relations with the West and resist Russia’s presumed interest in absorbing Belarus.
The Swedish Academy insists its selections are based on literary merit alone. It was repeatedly reprinted and sold out in more than two million copies. “In 2015, Svetlana Alexievich also met with her readers and held a presentation of her books as part of the fair”, the ministry said. “I need to catch a person at a moment when they have been shaken up”, Alexievich told Russia’s Ogonyok weekly magazine. “But it’s also a bit disturbing”.
She had been nominated for the Nobel Prize for many years.
‘For money I can buy one thing, I buy freedom. Both parents worked as teachers.
Alexievich’s oral histories have recorded thousands of individual voices to map the implosion of the Soviet Union. But her books, controversially written in Russian, are not published in her home country amid what the author has described as “a creeping censorship”.
Read excerpts of Voices from Chernobyl. Alexievich’s response, as with Chernobyl, was to talk to hundreds of people involved and get the real story of how the war affected them.
Once again the Nobel Prize for Literature has gone to someone you most likely hadn’t heard of.
The Belarusian is not the first historian to win the Nobel Prize.
It has been quite a long time since a nonfiction writer won the Nobel.
As the victor of the Nobel Literature Prize, Alexievich is awarded a little more than $1 million, according to MSN News. The awards in medicine, physics and chemistry were announced earlier this week.
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All awards will be given out during a ceremony on 10 December which is the anniversary of the prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death.
