Until she won the Nobel Prize in literature last year, Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich was largely unknown in the English- and Russian-speaking worlds. After beginning her career as a reporter, she has spent the past three decades working at the boundary of journalism and literature. Her books, which she calls “novels in voices,” are based on hundreds of interviews with ordinary citizens about some of the most painful episodes of the twentieth century: World War II, Chernobyl, the Soviet war in Afghanistan. She uses the voices of witnesses, interspersed with her own reflections, to express the collective trauma of world-historical …read more
Source: The New Republic
