Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich is a Belarusian investigative journalist, essayist, and oral historian who writes in Russian, born on 31 May 1948 in Stanislav (now Ivano-Frankivsk), Ukraine, to a Belarusian father and Ukrainian mother. She grew up in Belarus, graduated from Belarusian State University in 1972, and specialised in 'documentary literature'—collages of interviews forming polyphonic oral histories of pivotal Soviet-era events, including World War II, the Soviet-Afghan War, the Chernobyl disaster, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Her breakthrough work, War's Unwomanly Face (1985), compiled monologues from women who served in World War II, selling over two million copies. Other landmark books include Zinky Boys (1991), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand Time (2013). She received the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature 'for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time,' becoming the first Belarusian Nobel laureate in Literature. Facing persecution under Lukashenko's regime, she has lived in exile since 2020.