Svetlana Alexievich
Garbės daktarė / Honorary Doctor (Suteiktas vardas 2020-10-21)
Svetlana Alexievich is a Belarusian writer, journalist, and screenwriter who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015. She became the 14th female writer and the first Belarusian writer to receive the award. She was granted the title of VMU Honorary Doctor for her significant contributions to documentary fiction, the strengthening of democracy and human rights, the preservation of historical and polyphonic memory of people, and her substantial efforts in defending the values of freedom and justice.
Alexievich was born on 31 May 1948 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. Her father was Belarusian and her mother Ukrainian. After her father’s demobilisation from the army, the family moved to Belarus.
Svetlana Alexievich is best known for her documentary novels “The Unwomanly Face of War”, “Boys in Zinc”, “Chernobyl Prayer”, and “Secondhand Time”. These works, along with her fifth book “Last Witnesses”, form the “Voices of Utopia” series. In her writing, she has covered the war in Afghanistan, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Chernobyl disaster and its aftermath. Alexievich has created a unique genre of documentary narrative, which she calls the “novel of voices”. This genre, based on hundreds of interviews, makes it possible to create a broad, life-like, and spiritual panorama of the present through authentic accounts.
One of Svetlana Alexievich’s most famous books is “Chernobyl Prayer”, which features hundreds of interviews collected over nearly a decade with emergency responders, firefighters, military personnel, and their relatives. The book exposes the brutality of a system built on lies and the tragic lives and destinies of hundreds and thousands of devastated people.
In addition to being a writer, Aleksijević is also a journalist and a documentary film screenwriter, a role that is clearly reflected in her prose, which documents life, experiences, and historical events. She has written over 20 scripts for documentary films and 3 plays for the theatre.
In recent years, Svetlana Alexievich has gained recognition as an active critic of the Belarusian dictatorship. In 2000, she was forced to leave the country due to political persecution, but later returned. Since the events in Crimea in 2014, she has been travelling the world speaking about the interplay between politics, war, and Russian literature. In September 2020, in the wake of the mass movement against Alexander Lukashenko’s regime, she emigrated to Germany.
Alexievich has received numerous international awards, including the Remarque Prize (2001), the National Book Critics Circle Award (USA, 2006), the Big Book’s Readers’ Sympathy Prize for “Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets”, the Kurt Tucholsky Prize for Courage and Dignity in Writing, the Andrei Sinyavsky Prize For Nobility in Literature, the independent Russian Triumph Prize, and the Leipzig Prize for Best Political Book, among others. In 2013, she was awarded the International Peace Prize in Germany. In 2015, Alexievich received the Nobel Prize in Literature for her polyphonic prose that captures the suffering and heroism of our times.
