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 Her books are unpublished, available only from Russia, or smuggled in via Lithuania in small underground editions.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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Last spring, when the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano made some rueful comments about his classic anti-globalization, anti-imperialist history Open Veins of Latin America (1971), the Economist was delighted. At last there could be agreement that “capitalism is the only route to development in Latin America,” the magazine crowed. Galeano’s recantation could hardly have been more significant: “it was almost as if Jesus’s disciples had admitted that the New Testament was a big misunderstanding.”

Indeed, in the forty years since its publication Open Veins had achieved semi-mythic status. Uncompromising and accusatory, the book told of a centuries-long capitalist plunder operation, in which fruit companies, oil drillers, slave traders, and conquistadors collaborated to despoil the Americas. That story, containing more than a little truth, resonated with populist movements. The book became an international bestseller and the scourge of right-wing governments. It may have reached the height of its notoriety when Hugo Chavez gave Barack Obama a copy at the Summit of the Americas in 2009.

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