Svetlana Alexievich

Biography

Born in the west Ukrainian town of Stanislav (Ivano-Frankivsk since 1962) to a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother. Both her parents were teachers; her father was also a village school principal. She spent her early childhood in Ukraine; the family then moved to Belarus. She visited her grandmother in Ukraine during summer holidays. After graduating from high school she worked as a reporter in several local newspapers. In 1972 she graduated from Belarusian State University and became a correspondent for the literary magazine Nyoman in Minsk (1976). Her first manuscript, Ya uyekhal iz derevni ('I left the village') was blocked for publication by Soviet censorship.

In 1989 Alexievich published Zinky Boys, a book about the fallen soldiers who had returned in zinc coffins from the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979 – 1989. She was accused of "defamation" and "desecration of the soldiers' honor". Alexievich was tried a number of times between 1992 and 1996; she was sued by four interviewees. Three claims were dismissed, and one was partially upheld. Alexievich later said that she couldn't locate the recordings in time. After political persecution by the Lukashenko administration, she left Belarus in 2000. The International Cities of Refuge Network offered her sanctuary, and during the following decade she lived in Paris, Gothenburg and Berlin. In 2011, Alexievich moved back to Minsk.

Alexievich was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. In her first public statement after she was announced the Nobel Prize winner, she condemned Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Her books were not published by Belarusian state-owned publishing houses after 1993, while private publishers in Belarus have only published two of her books: Chernobyl Prayer in 1999 and Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets in 2013, both translated into Belarusian. As a result, Alexievich has been better known in the rest of the world than in Belarus.

She has been described as the first journalist to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. She disagrees that her work is journalism; the genre she works in is sometimes called "documentary literature".

In her own words:

I've been searching for a literary method that would allow the closest possible approximation to real life. Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, it tortured and hypnotized me, I wanted to capture it on paper. So I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents. This is how I hear and see the world – as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. This is how my eye and ear function. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realized to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher.

On 26 October 2019, Alexievich was elected chairman of the Belarusian PEN Center.

During the 2020 Belarusian protests, Alexievich became a member of the Coordination Council of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the leader of the Belarusian democratic movement and main opposition candidate against Lukashenko.

On 20 August, Alexander Konyuk, the Prosecutor-General of Belarus, initiated criminal proceedings against the members of the Coordination Council under Article 361 of the Belarusian Criminal Code, on the grounds of attempting to seize state power and harming national security. On 26 August, Alexievich was questioned by Belarusian authorities about her involvement in the council. On 9 September 2020, Alexievich alerted the press that "men in black masks" were trying to enter her apartment in central Minsk. "I have no friends and companions left in the Coordinating Council. All are in prison or have been forcibly sent into exile," she wrote in a statement. "First they kidnapped the country; now it's the turn of the best among us. But hundreds more will replace those who have been torn from our ranks. It is not the Coordinating Council that has rebelled. It is the country." Diplomats from Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia, and Sweden began to keep a round-the-clock watch on Alexievich's home to prevent her abduction by security services.

On 28 September 2020, Alexievich left Belarus for Germany, promising to return depending on political conditions in Belarus. Prior to her departure, she was the last member of the Coordination Council who was not in exile or under arrest.

In August 2021, her book The Last Witnesses was excluded from the school curriculum in Belarus and her name was removed from the curriculum. It was assumed that the exclusion was made for her political activity. In 2026, a Belarusian court added a collection of quotes by Alexievich to the list of extremist materials.

Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, she commented that "providing a territory for an aggressor country is nothing but complicity in a crime" in relation to Belarusian involvement in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.