Birth of Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich was born on 31 May 1948 in Ivano-Frankivsk. A Belarusian investigative journalist and writer, Alexievich writes in a documentary form that she calls a novel of voices, assembling testimonies from ordinary people into long polyphonic accounts. Her books include War's Unwomanly Face, about Soviet women in the Second World War, Voices from Chernobyl, Zinky Boys on the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and Secondhand Time, on the end of the Soviet Union. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015. She has criticized the authoritarian government of Belarus under Alexander Lukashenko, and lived for years in exile in Western Europe before returning.

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