Svetlana Aleksievich

Svetlana Alexievich is a Belarusian writer and journalist. She writes in Russian. She was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature.

She was born on May 31, 1948, in Ivano-Frankivsk (Ukraine) into a military family. Her father was Belarusian, and her mother Ukrainian. After her father was demobilized from the army, the family moved to his homeland, Belarus. They lived in a village. Her father and mother worked as rural schoolteachers.

After graduating from school, she worked as a correspondent for a district newspaper in Narovlya; even while still in school, she wrote poems and newspaper notes. In 1967 she became a student at the Faculty of Journalism of Belarusian State University in Minsk. During her studies, she several times won republican and all-Union competitions for scientific student papers.

After university, she was assigned to work in Brest Region for a district newspaper. While working for the newspaper, she also taught in a rural school. A year later she was hired in Minsk, in the editorial office of the republican newspaper Selskaya Gazeta (“The Rural Newspaper”). A few years later, she became a correspondent and then head of the essay and publicism department of the literary and art magazine Neman (an organ of the Union of Writers of Belarus).

Alexievich tried herself, her voice, in different genres: short stories, publicism, reportage. A decisive influence on her choice was exerted by the well-known Belarusian writer Ales Adamovich and his famous books I Am from the Fiery Village and The Blockade Book. They were not written by him alone, but in collaboration with other writers, yet the idea and development of this new genre for Belarusian and modern Russian literature belonged to him. Adamovich called this genre in different ways, always seeking an exact formulation: “a conciliar novel,” “a novel-oratorio,” “a novel-testimony,” “the people narrating about themselves,” “epic-choral prose,” etc. She always called him her main Teacher. In one interview, Svetlana Alexievich herself once formulated the main idea of her books, of her life, as follows: “I always want to understand how much of a human being there is in a human being. And how can we protect that