Description

Svetlana Alexievich is the 2015 Nobel Laureate in Literature. The prize is awarded to the Belarusian writer for her "polyphonic writing, a monument to suffering and courage in our time".

What it does, the Swedish Academy notes, is deepen our understanding of an entire era - through its extraordinary method of carefully creating collages of human voices.

Svetlana Alexievich was born in 1948 in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankivsk, her parents are Belarusian and Ukrainian. After her father's military service ended, the family moved to Belarus. Svetlana attended high school, then studied journalism at the University of Minsk (1967-72). Alexievich worked as a teacher and journalist.

Each of her works is the result of extensive research - interviews with between 500 and 700 people, review of thousands of documents, field visits. She has been called "the archaeologist of communism."