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Belarusian Alexievich wins Nobel Prize in Literature

By Andrew V. Pestano
The 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Belarusian author and journalist Svetlana Alexievich. Photo courtesy the NobelPrize.org
The 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Belarusian author and journalist Svetlana Alexievich. Photo courtesy the NobelPrize.org

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Oct. 8 (UPI) -- The 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to the Belarusian author and journalist Svetlana Alexievich, whose work offers insight into the former Soviet Union.

The Swedish Academy decided to award Alexievich the prestigious prize "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time," according to a press release.

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Alexievich was born in the Ukraine in 1948 to a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother. The family moved to Belarus where Alexievich worked as a teacher and journalist. She later studied journalism at the University of Minsk from 1967 until 1972.

Her first book, U vojny ne ženskoe lico (War's Unwomanly Face), published in 1985, was based on interviews Alexievich conducted with hundreds of women who participated in World War II while Alexievich worked at the Sel'skaja Gazeta newspaper in Minsk.

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"This work is the first in Alexievich's grand cycle of books, Voices of Utopia, where life in the Soviet Union is depicted from the perspective of the individual," the Swedish Academy said in a bibliographical note. "By means of her extraordinary method -- a carefully composed collage of human voices -- Alexievich deepens our comprehension of an entire era."

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Alexievich also wrote on the consequences of the 1968 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in her book Černobyl'skaja molitva (Voices from Chernobyl: Chronicle of the Future, in 1999, and of the Soviet Union's 1979-89 war in Afghanistan in the book Cinkovye mal'čiki (:Zinky Boys: Soviet voices from a forgotten war in 1990.

Alexievich is the 14th woman to become a Nobel literature laureate. After receiving word she won the award, she replied, "Fantastic!"

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The announcement of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature was delivered by Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy Sara Danius.

"She is, of course, an extraordinary writer," Danius said in an interview after the announcement. "For the past 30 or 40 years she's been busy mapping the Soviet and the post-Soviet individual, 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."

"A history of the soul, if you wish," Danius added.

Алексіевіч атрымлівае кветкі, усім дзякуе. шчасьлівая #nobelprize

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