Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich is a Belarusian journalist, writer, and historian. The daughter of two teachers, she studied journalism at the Belarusian State University in Minsk and went on to work as a teacher and newspaper journalist. She published her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War, an oral history of women’s experiences in World War II, in 1985, and since then has released five chronicles of Soviet and post-Soviet history, including Boys in Zinc (1991) and Voices from Chernobyl (1997). In 2015, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first time it had been given to a journalist.