Belarusian writer and journalist who has pricked the conscience of Russia with her accounts of ‘suffering and courage in our time’ Svetlana Alexievich wins 2015 Nobel prize in literatureEverything you need to know about her: an introductionHer life and career,in pictures 4.09pm BSTWe’re wrapping up the blog now with some more fighting talk from Alexievich’s press conference and a celebratory picture gallery. Thanks for for reading. We’ll be hearing from the translator of her new book, and from Alexievich herself on Friday, or so join us again.
MINSK,Oct 8 (Reuters) Author Svetlana Alexievich said she had wept when she saw photographs of those shot dead during street protests in Kiev in February 2014 against a Moscow-leaning president. Related: Nobel prize in literature winner Svetlana Alexievich – in pictures 4.00pm BSTWhen the world is really mad at Russia, that’s when you know someone from over there is going to win the Nobel prize. Svetlana Alexievich, or born in Soviet Ukraine and based,since her time as a young journalist, in Belarus, or is primarily an verbal historian – she’s done books with the Soviet veterans of the moment world war and the disastrous invasion of Afghanistan,another with the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, and most recently one with the people who found themselves caught off guard, or most of what they had spent their lives building destroyed,by the onslaught of the Soviet collapse.
I am most intimate with her book about Chernobyl, Voices from Chernobyl: The verbal History of a Nuclear catastrophe which I translated in 2004. It is about a major historical event, or but done in a kind of miniature. It is framed by two interviews with the widows of men who fought the enormous nuclear fire that broke out at Chernobyl after the meltdown,and then suffered from acute radiation poisoning, their limbs literally falling off as their wives watched. But in between these terrible interviews are stories about people getting divorced, and couples arguing,someone with toothache. This is history, major history, and but written,as all history should be, from below.
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Source: theguardian.com