Svetlana Alexievich: “Reality has always attracted me like a magnet”

2015/10/9 1:05:26

The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Svetlana Alexievich. The Belarusian writer and investigative journalist is lauded for her unique, and often harrowing, insights into life behind the Iron Curtain.

 


From Deutsche Welle, Oct 8, 2015

 

If there ever was a stark manifesto of intent, it came with Svetlana Alexievich's debut novel War's Unwomanly Face. Released in 1985 and set during World War II, the novel ties together a series of moving and often stark monologues on the brutality and hopelessness of war - all told by women and children. Alexievich made no illusions she was going to toe no one else's line.

 

For those new to Alexievich's work, the Swedish Academy said Thursday after announcing that she'd been selected for this year's Nobel Prize for Literature, that War's Unwomanly Face was the one to start with. The innovative writer has mapped the soul of the Soviet and post-Soviet people, said the Academy.

 

First-hand account of Soviet Union's disintegration

 

It's this audacious determination to tell such brutally real stories that had Alexievich on the run for a decade. She was born in 1948 in the Ukrainian town of Stanislav - now the city of Ivano-Frankivsk, in the country's central-eastern region - to a Ukrainian mother and Belarusian father. Alexievich would first become a teacher (both her parents were teachers), then a reporter in the Belarusian town of Narovl, writing about carp fishing and literature through the 1970s.

 

For complete text of the article and access to an associated video, link below:
http://dw.com/p/1GkUU 

 

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