Svetlana Alexievich

born in 1948 in Ivano-Frankivsk, USSR, Ukraine, Svetlana Alexievich is a Belarusian writer and a committed critic of dictatorial regimes. She is regarded as the most important and consistent representative of documentary literature. In 2015, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature »for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.«

Alexievich studied journalism in Minsk and worked as a teacher before becoming a reporter for various newspapers and magazines. Through the interviews she conducted in her journalistic work, she developed a unique literary form – the semi-documentary »novel in voices« – which she continued to refine aesthetically. Drawing on the oral testimonies of eyewitnesses, she wrote about several dramatic episodes in Soviet history: World War II, the war in Afghanistan, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Chernobyl disaster.

Her first prose work, »The Unwomanly Face of War« [1985, tr. Richard Pevear], focused on the experiences of Soviet women soldiers during and after the Second World War. In it, she condenses interviews into a powerful panorama that resists oblivion. For this, she was accused of defaming the »honor of the Great Patriotic War« and lost her job at a newspaper. Conflicts with the authorities continued throughout her career. Her book »Zinky Boys« [1989, tr. Julia Whitby], a collage of conversations with soldiers, their mothers, wives, and widows about the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, led to multiple court proceedings.

Under President Lukashenko’s regime, her books could no longer be published in Belarus. In 2000, she fled political persecution and lived in Western Europa – alternating between Italy, France, Germany, and Sweden – until her return to Minsk in 2012.

One of her most well-known works, »Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future« [2005, tr. Keith Gessen], uses interviews to create literary monologues that offer psychological portraits of those directly affected by the reactor disaster. The Frankfurter Rundschau called it »a harrowing requiem of mourning and accusation, placing the author unquestionably alongside Chekhov’s ›Sakhalin Island‹ and Solzhenitsyn’s ›The Gulag Archipelago‹.« Her form of documentary literature begins with extensive interviews with »ordinary people« and victims of history, which she shapes into monologic narratives. “I see the world, so to speak, in voices. […] Out of thousands of voices, I do not create reality (reality is incomprehensible), but an image of my time, of my country. […] Everything comes together as a small encyclopedia – the encyclopedia of my generation, of the people I have met«, she says of her method.

In her book »Second-hand Time« [2013, Bela Shayevich], Alexievich explores the fate of the post-Soviet individual. She lets eyewitnesses speak about themselves and about the state apparatus of Russia, about the end of socialism and the beginning of a new way of life. »My writing can’t keep up with the times,« she says in an interview. »Reality is changing too fast today and has become more fantastic than any fiction. We can no longer predict our own future – we no longer even know what we should dream of… Unlike Chekhov’s characters, we can’t say that life and humanity will be beautiful in a hundred years! A hundred years after he wrote that, we had Chernobyl, the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. We’ve ventured out into the wider world, seen ourselves, and returned to the same old question: Are we Europeans or Asians? We want to be Europeans, but we fail. Why is that?«

Svetlana Alexievich’s works have been translated into 52 languages and published in 55 countries. They have served as the basis for radio plays, theater productions, and documentary film scripts.

In addition to the Nobel Prize in Literature [2015], she has received numerous awards for her politically committed prose, including the Kurt Tucholsky Prize from Swedish PEN [1996], the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding [1998], the National Book Critics Circle Award [2006], the Polish Ryszard Kapuściński Prize [2011], and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade [2013]. In 2011, she was a guest of the Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program of the DAAD.

In 2020, during the political protests following the presidential elections in Belarus, she was once again forced to leave Minsk due to increasing repression and has since lived in Berlin.

Last Update: 2025

Der Krieg hat kein weibliches Gesicht
Henschel Verlag
Berlin, 1987 [Original: 1985]
[Ü: Johann Warkentin]
Suhrkamp Verlag
Berlin, 2015
[Ü: Ganna-Maria Braungardt]

Die letzten Zeugen. Kinder im Zweiten Weltkrieg
Verlag Neues Leben
Suhrkamp Verlag
Berlin, 2016
[Ü: Ganna-Maria Braungardt]

Zinkjungen. Afghanistan und die Folgen
S. Fischer Verlag
Frankfurt/Main, 1992 [Original: 1989]
[Ü: Ingeborg Kolinko]
Suhrkamp Verlag
Berlin, 2016
[Ü: Ingeborg Kolinko, Ganna-Maria Braungardt]

Im Banne des Todes
S. Fischer Verlag
Frankfurt/Main, 1994 [Original: 1993]
[Ü: Ingeborg Kolinko]

Tschernobyl. Eine Chronik der Zukunft
Berlin Verlag
Berlin, 1997 und 2006 [Original: 1997]
[Ü: Ingeborg Kolinko]
Suhrkamp Verlag
Berlin, 2019
[Ü: Ingeborg Kolinko, Ganna-Maria Braungardt]

Secondhand Zeit
Hanser Berlin
Berlin, 2013 [Original: 2013]
[Ü: Ganna-Maria Braungardt]
Suhrkamp Verlag
Berlin, 2015
[Ü: Ganna-Maria Braungardt]