Svetlana Alexievich — writer (nobel) with roots in the USSR
Svetlana Alexievich is a Belarusian journalist and prose writer born in Stanislaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine) who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015. Her documentary prose — Voices from Chernobyl, The Unwomanly Face of War, Boys in Zinc, Second-Hand Time — records the human experience of Soviet and post-Soviet catastrophe through hundreds of recorded testimonies.
Tracing the roots — Stanislaviv (Ukr)
Born in Stanislaviv (then Ukrainian SSR) in 1948 to a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother, Alexievich spent her career in Minsk, Belarus. Her work — recording the voices of Soviet soldiers, Chernobyl victims, war survivors, and the people who lived through the USSR's collapse — is the most sustained literary monument to what Soviet civilisation cost its people.
Stanislaviv (Ukr). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.
A career defined by ambition
"I collect the history of feelings — not events."