Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian journalist has been awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature.
The Chair of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, said Svetlana was chosen for “her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”
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. It’s a history of emotions – what she’s offering us is really an emotional world, so these historical events she’s covering in her various books, for example the Chernobyl disaster, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, these are in a way just pretexts for exploring the Soviet individual and the post Soviet individual.”
“She’s conducted thousands and thousands of interviews with children, with women and with men, and in this way she’s offering us a history of human beings about whom we didn’t know that much … and at the same time she’s offering us a history of emotions, a history of the soul.”