Belarusian writer and investigative journalist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2015, "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time". Since Winston Churchill (awarded in 1953), Svetlana Alexievich is the first Nobel laureate writing mostly nonfiction. She has published meticulously reseached chonicles of modern history, such as the Soviet war in Afghanistan, fall of the Soviet Empire, and Chernobyl disaster. Her books are characterized by the use of multiple voices that record the emotional experience during the course of social upheavals. Alexievich writes in Russian. 

"I don't know what I should talk about – about death or about love? Or are they the same? Which one should I talk about?" (from Voices from Chermobyl, 1997)

Svetlana Alexievich was born in Stanislav (now Ivano-Frankivsk) in western Ukraine. Her father was a Belarusian and mother a Ukrainian. Both of her parents were teachers. The village where she grew up was mostly populated by women ‒ about every fourth man had been killed in the resistance during the war. Alexievich's father lost his two brothers.

Alexievich began writing while still at school. Like most children, she was a member of the Little Octobrists from age seven to nine, she then joined the Young Pioneers and the Komsomol, the youth division of the Communist Party. Like her comrades, she believed that her generation can do anything. "At heart, we were built for war," she wrote in Second-hand Time (2013). "We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We've never known anything else ‒ hence our wartime psychology." Disillusionment came later.

After working as a teacher in a rural school, Alexievich entered the University of Minsk, where she studied journalism and graduated in 1972. She was employed as a journalist in Beresa and then in Minsk. For a  period she was a correspondent for the literary magazine Neman, before becoming the head of the section for non-fiction. In Minsk she lived in a nine-story concrete apartment bloc, located in the central city; her address was well known to the secret police. All the important conversations she held in the small kitchen.

Her first book, I've Left My Village, was labelled anti-Communist and destroyed. In 1983 she completed War’s Unwomanly Face, which consisted of testimonies of hundreds of female WWII veterans. The book came out two years later, during the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the victory in the Great Patriotic War. President Mikhail Gorbatshov referred to it in a speech, which lifted the ban on the subject. Although the book was censored with many cuts, is was a bestseller, selling more than 2 million copies, but not all of Alexiyecich's works have been commercial successes. A new edition, in which Alexievich added some new material and restored the censored parts was published by the Palmira publishing house (Moscow) twenty years later.

War’s Unwomanly Face was the first in her "factional" chronicle entitled Voices of Utopia (Golosa Utopii). Its companion volume, Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II (1985) was a documentary history of the war from the perspective of the children. The original title of this heartbreaking collection of memoirs (Poslednie svideteli: Sto nedetskikh kolybelnykh) translates as "Last Witnesses: A Hundred of Unchildlike Lullabys." One of the interviewed persons, an architect who was four years old when the war began, gives a short summary of the experience of his generation: "I missed the time of childhood, it fell out of my life. I'm a man without a childhood. Instead of a childhood, I have the war." (Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II, 1985, p. 33)

In many ways, Alexiyevich's chronicles has continued and developed further the modern "documentary novel" or "narrative nonfiction". This multilayered form of fiction has engaged  a number of prominent writers from all over the world ‒ its masters include Ibuse Masuji (1898-1993), Norman Mailer (1923-2007), Truman Capote, (1924-1984), Paavo Rintala (1930-1999), Joan Didion (b. 1934), and Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005).

Zinky Boys (1989), about the Soviet-Afghan war, which contributed to the fall of the Soviet empire, drew on interviews of officers, soldiers, wives, mothers and widows. The title refers to the sealed zinc coffins in which the Sovied dead were shipped back. "I don't want to hear any talk about a 'political mistake', OK? Give me my legs back if it was really a mistake," says one of the officers. Alexievich had decided not to write about war again in 1986, but meeting a crying mother who had just lost her son in Afghanistan and an army officer escorting a private soldier who had gone mad in Kabul changed her mind. After the publication of the work, the KGB and military authorities organized a campaign of persecution against Alexievich. In 1993 the mothers of two veterans sued her for slandering the Soviet Army. The court confiscated all her tapes and files as evidence.

Alexievich has been described as a writer of "literary reportage". Her working process is heavily research led. For each of her books, she has interviewed hundreds of people, building up the work from fragments of  memories, images, fears, and hopes. Although her his interviewers speak for themselves and are alone, their stories resonate together and reveal a kind of emotional history. It usually takes her three or four years to complete a book.

With Voices from Chernobyl, an oral history of the largest technologicl disaster of the twentieth century, Alexievich spent more than ten years. In the final version she included 107 interviews out of 500. There is a re-settler who thinks that "there was any Chernobyl, they made it up. They tricked people. My sister left with her husband. Not far from here, twenty kilometers. They lived there two months, and the neighbor comes running: 'Your cow sent radiation to my cow! She's falling down.' 'How'd she send it?' 'Through the air, that's how, like dust. It flies.' Just fairy tales! Stories and more stories." The author herself, who was not satisfied with the reporting of the disaster in the media, says in her own monologue that "I often thought that the simple fact, the mechanical fact, no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision."  

Following President Lukashenko's increasing harassment of the opposition, she left her home country in 2000. Her works were not published in Belarus, but with the help of the Soros Foundation, Russian editions have found their way to libraries. Before returning in 2011 to Minsk, she lived in Paris and Gothenburg and in Berlin as a guest of the "Berlin Artists-in-Residence programme". Alexievich writes in Russian, but she do not call herself a Russian or Belarusian writer. "I would say I’m a writer of that epoch, the Soviet utopia, writing the history of that utopia in each of my books," Alexievich has concluded. She sees that  Belarusian language, which was revived at the end of 1980s, will never have the  upper hand in competition with the Russian language.  

Besides the Nobel Prize, Alexievich's many awards include the Herder Prize (1999), the National Book Critics Circle Award (2005) for Voices from Chernobyl, the Swedish PEN prize (2007) for her "courage and dignity as a writer," the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (2013), and the Prix Médicis essai (2013). After the announcement of the Nobel Prize, President Alexander Lukashenko sent his greetings to Alexievich, stating that "I strongly hope that this prize will serve the Belarusian state and the nation." A few days later Lukashenko, called Europe's last dictator, won a fifth term in office. Alexievich boycotted the elections, saying "we know who will win". Her provocative statement, that the Belarussian language is "rural and literarily unripe" made her a controversial  figure for Belarussian nationalists. Russian critics have complained that she portrays the Soviet past in an unfavourable light, or that she even acts as a Western political agent. "The Belarussian authorities pretend that I don't exist. My books are not published. I can't speak anywhere, at leat on Belarussian television," she said after receiving the Nobel Prize. ('When Autocracies Have No Respect for the Nobel Prize' by Ina Shakhrai, in The Journal of Belarusian Studies, Volume 8, Number 1, 2016, p. 35)

In July 2014 Alexievich wrote in Le Monde, that the annexion of Crimea to Russia revealed the country's return to fundamentalism, to the dream of being a great empire and  inspire fear. "Empty shelves in stores and long lines for toilet papers may be things of the past in Russia, but affluence never led to democracy in Russia. It only helped an imperialistic mindset resurface." At a discussion in Warsaw, held on the publication of the Polish translation of  Vremia sekond khend (Second-hand Time), about social-political processes in Russia during the last twenty years, Alexievich said that, "My book is not hopeless. It describes the strength of the human spirit. But I cannot find an answer to one question. Why do our sufferings, our grandfathers' sufferings not convert into freedom?" Second-hand Time was published in English in 2016.

Alexievich's books have been translated into more than forty languages. She has revealed that the subject of his next book will be love, in "every combination possible". Along with 30 other writers, she left the Russian PEN in January 2017 as a protest after the journalist and activist Sergey Parkhomenko had been excluded from the organization. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, she said that Lukashenko's decision to support President Vladimir Putin and allow Belarusian territory to be used by Russian troops was "a crime." "Ukrainians will fight to the end. We must follow the example of Ukraine." (Belsat TV, 03.08.2022)

For further reading: Environmental Cultures in Soviet East Europe: Literature, History and Memory by Anna Barcz (2021); 'Learning from One’s Inner Thucydides: Reflections on Translating Svetlana Alexievich' by Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky, in Translation Review, Volume 97: Number 1 (2017); Literary Journalism across the Globe: Journalistic Traditions and Transnational Influences, ed. by John S. Bak and Bill Reynolds (2011); 'The Problem of Narration and Reconciliation in Svetlana Aleksievich’s Testimony Voices from Chernobyl’' by Johanna Lindbladh, in The Poetics of Memory in Post-Totalitarian Narration, ed. by Johanna Lindbladh (2008); 'Alexievich, Svetlana. Voices from Chernobyl', in The Russian Review, Vol 65, Number 2 (2006); 'Translator's Preface' by Keith Gessen, in Voices from Chernobyl (2005); 'Introduction' by Larry Heineman, in Zinky Boys (1992) 

Selected works:

• U voyny ne zhenskoe litso, 1985
  - War’s Unwomanly Face (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1988)
  - Sodalla ei ole naisen kasvoja (suom. Robert Kolomainen, 1988) 
• Poslednie svideteli, 1985
  - Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2019)
  
• Tsinkovye mal'chiki, 1989
  - Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War (translated by Julia and Robin Whitby, 1992)
  
• Zacharovannye smertiu, 1994 
• "'I Am Loath to Recall": Russian Women Soldiers in World War II,' 1995 (in Women's Studies Quarterly, Volume XXIII, Numbers 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 1995)
  
• Tschernobylskaja molitwa, 1997
  - Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (translated by Keith Gessen, 2005)
  - Tšernobylista nousee rukous (suomentanut Marja-Leena Jaakkola, 2000)
  
• 'Landscape of Loneliness,' 2003 (in Nine: An Anthology of Russia’s Foremost Women Writers)
• Vremia sekond khend, 2013
  - Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (translated by Bela Shayevich, 2016)
  - Neuvostoihmisen loppu: Kun nykyhetkestä tuli second handia (suom. Vappu Orlov, 2018)
• Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories by Svetlana Alexievich, 2019 (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)