Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own distinctive nonfiction genre, which gathers a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include War’s Unwomanly Face (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Zinky Boys (1990), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand Time (2013). She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”
Author website: http://alexievich.info
Books (In English) in order of publication:
War’s Unwomanly Face – 1983
Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War – 1989
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster – 2006
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets – 2013
On the Battle Lost – 2015
In Search of the Free Individual: The History of the Russian-Soviet Soul – 2018
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