Svetlana Alexievich: ‘Chernobyl kills’
Svetlana Alexievich was at home in Minsk when the phone rang. For some years, she says, rumours had swirled that the Swedish Academy was considering her name. She had already received many honours. Still, it had been more than half a century since a non-fiction writer – Winston Churchill in 1953 – had won literature’s top award. The news from Stockholm was indeed stunning: Alexievich had won the 2015 Nobel prize in literature.
“This is such an important prize, such an enormous prize, you’d have to be a complete idiot to expect to win it,” she tells me. Over the next few hours the phone at her modest two-room flat in Belarus’s capital rang unceasingly. Callers included Mikhail Gorbachev, the French and German presidents, friends and well-wishers. Thousands of people wrote to her.
Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter Read more One person, though, “kept silent”. This was Belarus’s implacable dictator of 21 years, Alexander Lukashenko. Lukashenko faced a dilemma: the award was self-evidently a major honour for Belarus, and yet Alexievich was one of his most prominent critics. At home, officially at least, she was an unperson. Her books are unpublished, available only from Russia, or smuggled in via Lithuania in small underground editions. Her name is missing from school textbooks.
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