2015 Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to Svetlana Alexievich

On October 8, 2015, the Swedish Academy announced that Svetlana Alexievich had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Alexievich (whose name is also transliterated as Aleksievich or Aleksiyevich) is a Belarusian writer of oral histories. She was born in 1948 in Ukraine and grew up in Belarus. After finishing school, she worked as a reporter for several local newspapers before graduating from Belarusian State University, where she studied journalism, in 1972. She later interviewed witnesses of the most dramatic events in her country, such as World War II, the Chernobyl disaster, and the Soviet-Afghan War, in order to write her books.

Alexievich may seem an unusual choice for the literature prize, which is often awarded to a novelist or poet. According to New Yorker staffer Philip Gourevitch,

Svetlana Alexievich is an investigative journalist, not a fiction writer, but she calls her books "novels in voices." It is a term that speaks to her method – a "mélange of reportage and oral history" – and also to her ambition, which is not to deliver the news, but to describe what it was like to live through and to live with some of the defining traumas of the Soviet Union.

Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, described Alexievich's work this way:

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.

Alexievich told an interviewer for The Guardian that she'd received her phone call from the Academy while she was at home "doing the ironing." She commented that the prize money (8 million Swedish krona, the equivalent of almost a million U.S. dollars) would buy her freedom. “It takes me a long time to write my books, from five to 10 years. I have two ideas for new books so I’m pleased that I will now have the freedom to work on them.”

The Lake Forest Library recently purchased two of Alexievich's books, Voices from Chernobyl : the oral history of a nuclear disaster and Zinky boys : Soviet voices from the Afghanistan War. They are currently shelved in the New Nonfiction area of the library and are ready for checkout.