Svetlana Alexievich

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Svetlana Alexievich (born May 31, 1948) is a Byelorussian investigative journalist and author. Born in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankovsk to a Byelorussian father and Ukrainian mother, she grew up in Belorussia, where after finishing school, she worked as a reporter on the local paper in the town of Narovl, Gomel Region.

She went on to a career in journalism and writing non-fiction books about Russia, the Soviet Union and other neighboring countries. Her relations with the new government of Belorussia are not good due to her independence and criticisms, and the regimes crack down on independent journalists. She belongs to the opposition which also includes other members of the country's intellectuals. She lived in Italy for a while in the early 2000's financed in part by a European Union scholarship.

Her books are described as a literary chronicle of the emotional history of the Soviet and post-Soviet person. Her most notable works in English translation are about first-hand accounts from the war in Afghanistan (Zinky Boys) and a highly-praised oral history of the Chernobyl disaster (Voices from Chernobyl). She describes the theme of her works this way:

“

"If you look back at the whole of our history, both Soviet and post-Soviet, it is a huge common grave and a blood bath. An eternal dialogue of the executioners and the victims. The accursed Russian questions: what is to be done and who is to blame. The revolution, the gulags, the Second World War, the Soviet-Afghan war hidden from the people, the downfall of the great empire, the downfall of the giant socialist land, the land-utopia, and now a challenge of cosmic dimensions - Chernobyl. This is a challenge for all the living things on earth. Such is our history. And this is the theme of my books, this is my path, my circles of hell, from man to man."

”

Alexiyevich's book have been published in many countries: USA, Germany, UK, Japan, Sweden, France, China, Vietnam, Bulgaria, India -- 19 countries in all. She has to her name 21 scripts for documentary films and three plays, which were staged in France, Germany, and Bulgaria.

Alexiyevich has been awarded many international awards, including the Kurt Tucholsky Prize for the "Courage and Dignity in Writing" (the Swedish PEN), the Andrei Sinyavsky Prize "For the Nobility in Literature", the independent Russian prize "Triumph", the Leipzig Prize "For the European Mutual Understanding- 1998", the German prizes "For the Best Political Book" and the Herder Prize. Voices from Chernobyl won the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award.

[edit] Works

English translations

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of the Nuclear Disaster (Dalkey Archive Press 2005; ISBN 1-56478-401-0)
Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War (W W Norton & Co Inc 1992; ISBN 0-393-03415-1)
War's Unwomanly Face (Progress Publishers 1988)
Last Witnesses