Everything you need to know about Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel prize in literature

The Belarusian journalist and author has explored conflict and its aftermath for more than 30 years, interviewing thousands in a quest to ‘get the closest possible approximation to real life’. Here is an introduction to her life and work

Svetlana Alexievich wins 2015 Nobel prize in literature
The news and reaction – as it happenedHer life and career, in pictures

The winner of the 2015 Nobel prize in literature, Svetlana Alexievich, is an unfamiliar name to many English-speaking readers. But her work has given voice to survivors of conflict and disaster all over the former Soviet Union, shedding light into the emotional lives of people she has met from Chernobyl to Kabul. Here are some key facts about her life and work. If you have read her, we’d love to hear from you in the comments.

This is how I hear and see the world – as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details

For the past 30 or 40 years she’s been busy mapping the Soviet and post-Soviet individual. But it’s not really a history of events. It’s a history of emotions. What she’s offering us is really an emotional world. So these historical events that she’s covering in her various books – for example the Chernobyl disaster or the Soviet war in Afghanistan – are, in a way, just pretexts for exploring the soviet individual and the post soviet individual. She’s conducted thousands of interviews with children, women and men, and in this way she’s offering us a history of a human being about whom we didn’t know that much.”

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