Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich was born in 1948 in the western Ukrainian town of Stanislav, now Ivano-Frankivsk, to a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother, both teachers. The family moved to Belarus during her childhood. She worked on local newspapers, graduated in journalism from the Belarusian State University in 1972, and later joined the Minsk literary magazine Neman. The Belarusian writer Ales Adamovich, who believed that the catastrophes of the twentieth century were best told through the testimony of witnesses rather than invention, became a decisive influence.

Her method is to listen, often for years, to hundreds of people, and then to compose their words into a choral whole in which her own voice nearly disappears. The Unwomanly Face of War (1985) gathered the memories of Soviet women who fought in the Second World War; Last Witnesses recorded those of people who were children at the time. Zinky Boys (1989), on the Soviet war in Afghanistan, brought accusations of defamation and a series of lawsuits. Chernobyl Prayer followed the survivors of the nuclear disaster, and Secondhand Time (2013) gave voice to the disorientation that followed the Soviet collapse. Together the books form a long emotional history of homo sovieticus.

Unwelcome to the Lukashenko government, she left Belarus in 2000 and lived for a decade in Paris, Gothenburg and Berlin before returning to Minsk in 2011. The Nobel Prize in 2015 honoured her polyphonic writings as a monument to suffering and courage; she was the first Belarusian writer to receive it. In 2020 she joined the opposition’s Coordination Council after the disputed presidential election and, as its members were arrested or exiled, left for Germany that September.