Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian writer whose oral histories have recorded thousands of individual voices to map the implosion of the Soviet Union, has won the Nobel prize for literature. 
 
 The Swedish Academy, announcing her win, praised Alexievich’s “polyphonic writings”, describing them as a “monument to suffering and courage in our time”. 
 
 Nobel prize in literature: Svetlana Alexievich wins "for her polyphonic writings" – live Read more 
 
 She becomes the 14th woman to win the prize since it was first awarded in 1901. The last woman to win, Canada’s Alice Munro, was handed the award in 2013. 
 
 Speaking by phone to the Swedish broadcaster SVT, Svetlana Alexievich said that the award left her with a “complicated” feeling. 
 
 “It immediately evokes such great names as [Ivan] Bunin, [Boris] Pasternak,” she said, referring to Russian writers who have won the prize. “On the one hand, it’s such a fantastic feeling, but it’s also a bit disturbing.” 
 
 
 
 
 
 The academy called while she was at home, “doing the ironing,” she said, adding that the 8m Swedish krona (£775,000) prize would “buy her freedom”. 
 
 “It takes me a long time to write my books, from five to 10 years. I have two ideas for new books so I’m pleased that I will now have the freedom to work on them.” 
 
 Alexievich was born on the 31 May 1948 in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankovsk into a family of a serviceman. Her father is Belarusian and her mother is Ukrainian. After her father’s demobilisation from the army the family returned to his native Belorussia and settled in a village where both parents worked as schoolteachers. She left school to work as a reporter on the local paper in the town of Narovl. 
 
 She has written short stories, essays and reportage but says she found her voice under the influence of the Belorusian writer Ales Adamovich, who developed a genre which he variously called the “collective novel”, “novel-oratorio”, “novel-evidence”, “people talking about themselves” and the “epic chorus”. 
 
 According to Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Alexeivich is an “extraordinary” writer. 
 
 “For the past 30 or 40 years she’s been busy mapping the Soviet and post soviet individual,” Danius said, “but it’s not really about a history of events. It’s a history of emotions – what she’s offering us is really an emotional world, so these historical events she’s covering in her various books, for example the Chernobyl disaster, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, these are in a way just pretexts for exploring the Soviet individual and the post-Soviet individual.” 
 
 “She’s conducted thousands and thousands of interviews with children, with women and with men, and in this way she’s offering us a history of human beings about whom we didn’t know that much ... and at the same time she’s offering us a history of emotions, a history of the soul.” 
 
 In Voices From Chernobyl, Alexievich interviews hundreds of those affected by the nuclear disaster, from a woman holding her dying husband despite being told by nurses that “that’s not a person anymore, that’s a nuclear reactor” to the soldiers sent in to help, angry at being “flung ... there, like sand on the reactor”. In Zinky Boys, she gathers voices from the Afghan war: soldiers, doctors, widows and mothers. 
 
 
 
 “I don’t ask people about socialism, I ask about love, jealousy, childhood, old age,” Alexievich writes in the introduction to Second-hand Time, which is due from independent publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2016. “Music, dances, hairstyles. The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life. This is the only way to chase the catastrophe into the framework of the mundane and attempt to tell a story. 
 
 “It never ceases to amaze me how interesting ordinary, everyday life is. There are an endless number of human truths … History is only interested in facts; emotions are excluded from its realm of interest. It’s considered improper to admit them into history. I look at the world as a writer, not strictly an historian. I am fascinated by people.” 
 
 Extract: Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich Read more 
 
 Danius pointed new readers towards her first book U vojny ne ženskoe lico (War’s Unwomanly Face), based on interviews with hundreds of women who participated in the second world war. 
 
 “It’s an exploration of the second world war from a perspective that was, before that book, almost completely unknown,” she said. “It tells the story of the hundreds and hundreds of women who were at the front in the second world war. Almost one million Soviet women participated in the war, and it’s a largely unknown history. It was a huge success in the Soviet Union union when published, and sold more than 2m copies. It’s a touching document and at the same time brings you very close to every individual, and in a few years they all will be gone.” 
 
 According to her close friend, the Belarusian opposition leader Andrei Sannikov, Alexeivich writes about “the history of the Red Man”. 
 
 “She claims he is not gone,” Sannikov said. “She argues that this man is inside us, inside every Soviet person. Her last book, Second-hand Time, is dedicated to this problem.” Alexeivich is “wonderful at interviewing” he continued. “She doesn’t avoid difficult issues or questions. Mostly she writes about human tragedy. She lets it go through her and writes with surgical precision about what’s going on within human nature.” 
 
 Bela Shayevich, who is currently translating Alexievich into English for Fitzcarraldo, also paid tribute to her skills as an interviewer which leave her work “resounding with nothing but the truth”. 
 
 “The truth of life in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia is not an easy thing to swallow,” Shayevich said. “I’m thrilled that this win will mean that more readers will be exposed to the metaphysical dimensions of her subjects’ survival and despair through the tragedies of Soviet history. I hope that in reading her, more people see the ways that suffering – even suffering brought on by geopolitical circumstances foreign to many readers – is also something that can bring people closer to one another if they are willing to take a risk and listen.” 
 
 Although Alexievich is widely translated into German, French and Swedish, winning a range of major prizes for her work, English editions of her work are sparse. Fitzcarraldo editor Jacques Testard came across her work in French a few years ago. 
 
 “It’s an oral history, as are all her books, about nostalgia for the Soviet Union,” said Testard. “She went around Russia interviewing people after the fall of the Soviet Union, in an attempt to surmise what the collective post Soviet psyche is. As with all her books, it’s really harrowing – a story about loss of identity, about finding yourself in a country which you don’t recognise any more. It’s a micro-historical survey of Russia in the second half of the 20th century, and it goes up to the Putin years.” 
 
 
 
 
 
 “She’s been a big deal in Europe for a long time, but she’s never really been picked up in England,” he said. 
 
 
 
 “Her books are very unusual and difficult to categorise. They’re technically non-fiction, but English and American publishers are loath to take risks on a book just because it’s good, without something like a Nobel prize.” 
 
 Alexievich led the odds for the 2015 award, ahead of Japan’s Haruki Murakami, Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse. ||||| STOCKHOLM (AP) — Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for works that the prize judges called "a monument to suffering and courage." 
 
 Alexievich, 67, used the skills of a journalist to create literature chronicling the great tragedies of the Soviet Union and its collapse: World War II, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the suicides that ensued from the death of Communism. 
 
 Her first novel, "The Unwomanly Face of the War," published in 1985 and based on the previously untold stories of women who had fought against the Nazi Germans, sold more than 2 million copies. 
 
 Her books have been published in 19 countries. She also has written three plays and the screenplays for 21 documentary films. In its brief citation the Swedish Academy, cited Alexievich "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time." 
 
 Last year's literature award went to French writer Patrick Modiano. 
 
 This year's Nobel announcements continue with the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday and the economics award on Monday. All awards will be handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896. ||||| THE CHRONICLER OF THE UTOPIAN LAND Says Alexievich: "I've been searching for a genre that would allow the closest possible approximation to how I see and hear the world. Finally I chose the genre of actual human voices and confessions. Today when man and the world have become so multifaceted and diversified, when we finally realized how mysterious and unfathomable man really is, a story of one life, or rather the documentary evidence of this story, brings us closest to reality." Svetlana Alexiyevich was born 31 May 1948 in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankovsk into the family of a serviceman. Her father is Belarusian and her mother is Ukrainian. After Father's demobilization from the army the family returned to his native Belorussia and settled in a village where both Father and Mother worked as schoolteachers. (The father's grandfather was also a rural schoolteacher.) After finishing school Alexiyevich worked as a reporter on the local paper in the town of Narovl, Gomel Region. Already in her school days she wrote poetry and contributed articles to the school newspaper. At that time she needed two years work record (as was the rule in those days) in order to enroll in the Department of Journalism of Minsk University, entering it in 1967. During her university years she won several awards at the republican and all-Union competitions for scholarly and students' papers. Having received her degree she was sent to the town of Beresa, Brest Region, to work on the local paper. At the same time Alexiyevich taught at the local school. At that time she was torn between various career options: to continue the family tradition of school teaching, scholarly work, or journalism. But after a year she was invited to Minsk to work on the Rural Newspaper. Several years later she took the job of a correspondent for the literary magazine Neman and was soon promoted to the head of the section for non-fiction. She tried her voice in various genres, such as the short story, essay, and reportage. It was the famous Byelorussian writer Ales Adamovich who made a decisive influence on Svetlana's choice, particularly his books I'm from the Fiery Village and The Book of the Siege. He wrote them jointly with other authors but the idea and its development were entirely his, and it was a new genre for both Byelorussian and Russian literature. Adamovich was looking for the right definition of the genre, calling it "collective novel", "novel-oratorio", "novel-evidence", "people talking about themselves", "epic chorus", to name a few of his appellations. Alexiyevich has always named Adamovich as her main teacher. He helped her to find a path of her own. In one of her interviews she said: "I've been searching for a literary method that would allow the closest possible approximation to real life. Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, it tortured and hypnotized me, I wanted to capture it on paper. So I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents. This is how I hear and see the world - as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. This is how my eye and ear function. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realized to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher." In 1983 she completed her book The Unwomanly Face of the War. For two years it was sitting at a publishing house but was not published. Alexiyevich was accused of pacifism, naturalism, de-glorification of the heroic Soviet woman. Such accusations could have quite serious consequences in those days. All the more so since already after her first book I've Left My Village (monologues of people who abandoned their native parts) she has already had a reputation of a dissident journalist with anti-Soviet sentiments. On order of the Byelorussian Central Committee of the Communist Party Alexiyevich's already composed book was destroyed and she was accused of anti-Communist and anti-government views. She was threatened with losing her job. They told her: "How can you work on our magazine with such alien views? And why are you not yet a member of the Communist Party?" But new times came with Mikhail Gorbachev's coming to power and the start of the perestroika. 
 
 In 1985 The Unwomanly Face of the War came out simultaneously in Minsk and in Moscow. In subsequent years it was repeatedly reprinted; all in all more than two million copies were sold out. This novel, which the author calls "the novel-chorus", is made up of monologues of women in the war speaking about the unknown aspects of the Second World War that had never been related before. The book was hailed by the war writers as well as the public. 
 
 In the same year her second book came out: The Last Witnesses: 100 Unchildlike Stories, which has also languished unpublished for the same reasons (pacifism, failure to meet ideological standards). This book also ran into many reprints and was acclaimed by numerous critics, who called both books "a discovery in the genre of war prose". The war seen through women's and children's eyes opened up a whole new area of feelings and ideas. The 40th anniversary of the war was marked by the theatre production of The Unwomanly Face of the War at the renowned Taganka Theatre (staged by Anatoly Efros.) The Omsk Drama Theatre received the State Prize for their production of The Unwomanly Face of the War. The play based on this novel was running in many theatres around the country. A cycle of documentary films was produced on the basis of The Unwomanly Face of the War. The film cycle was awarded with the State Prize, and received the Silver Dove at the Leipzig Festival of Documentary Films. Alexiyevich also received many other prizes for this work. 1989 saw the publication of The Boys in Zinc, a book about the criminal Soviet-Afghan war that had been concealed from the Soviet people for ten years. To collect material for the book Alexiyevich was traveling around the country for four years to meet war victims' mothers and veterans of the Afghan war. She also visited the war zone in Afghanistan. The book was a bombshell and many people could not forgive the author for de-mythologizing the war. In the first place the military and Communist papers attacked Alexiyevich. In 1992, court proceedings have been opened against the author and her book in Minsk. The democratically minded public rose in defense of the book. The case was closed. (Photo: Kabul, 1988) Later several documentary films and plays were based on this book. In 1993, she published Enchanted with Death, a book about attempted suicides as a result of the downfall of their socialist mainland. They were people who felt inseparable from the socialist ideals, who were unable to accept the new order, the new country with its newly interpreted history. The book was adapted for the cinema (The Cross). 
 
 In 1997, Alexiyevich published her book The Chernobyl Prayer: the Chronicles of the Future. The book is not so much about the Chernobyl disaster as about the world after it: how are people adapting to the new reality, which has already happened but is not yet perceived. The post-Chernobyl people obtain new knowledge, which is of benefit for the whole mankind. They live as it were after the third world war, after a nuclear war. The book's subtitle is very significant in this respect. "If you look back at the whole of our history, both Soviet and post-Soviet, it is a huge common grave and a blood bath. An eternal dialogue of the executioners and the victims. The accursed Russian questions: what is to be done and who is to blame. The revolution, the gulags, the Second World War, the Soviet-Afghan war hidden from the people, the downfall of the great empire, the downfall of the giant socialist land, the land-utopia, and now a challenge of cosmic dimensions - Chernobyl. This is a challenge for all the living things on earth. Such is our history. And this is the theme of my books, this is my path, my circles of hell, from man to man." Alexiyevich's book have been published in many countries: USA, Germany, UK, Japan, Sweden, France, China, Vietnam, Bulgaria, India -- 19 countries in all. 
 
 She has to her name 21 scripts for documentary films and three plays, which were staged in France, Germany, and Bulgaria. Alexiyevich has been awarded with many international awards, including the Kurt Tucholsky Prize for the "Courage and Dignity in Writing" (the Swedish PEN), the Andrei Sinyavsky Prize "For the Nobility in Literature", the independent Russian prize "Triumph", the Leipzig Prize "For the European Mutual Understanding- 1998", the German prizes "For the Best Political Book" and the Herder Prize. 
 
 Alexiyevich has thus defined the main thrust of her life and her writings: "I always aim to understand how much humanity is contained in each human being, and how I can protect this humanity in a person." 
 
 These questions acquire a new implication in connection with the latest events in Beloruss where a military-socialist regime is being restored, a new post-Soviet dictatorship. And now Alexiyevich is again unwelcome to the authorities in her country because of her views and her independence. She belongs to the opposition which also includes the country's finest intellectuals. Her books add up to a literary chronicle of the emotional history of the Soviet and post-Soviet person. She continues to develop her original genre. In each new book it is employed in a new way. One can't help recalling Lev Tolstoy's maxim to the effect that it is more interesting to follow real life than to invent it. "Many things in man still remain a riddle for art," says Alexiyevich. For her 50th anniversary a two-volume collection of her works came out. In the introduction the critic Lev Anninsky says: "This is a unique work, which has probably been undertaken for the first time in Russian, or rather in Soviet and post-Soviet culture: the author has traced and recorded the lives of several generations of Soviet people, and the very reality of the 70 years of socialism: from the 1917 Revolution through the Civil War, the youth and hypnotism of the great utopia, Stalin's terror and the gulags, the Great Patriotic War, and the years of the downfall of the socialist mainland up to the present times. This is a living history told by the people themselves and recorded and selected by a talented and honest chronicler." Alexiyevich is currently finishing her book The Wonderful Deer of the Eternal Hunt made up of love stories. Men and women of different generations tell their personal stories. "It occurred to me that I've been writing books about how people kill one another, how they die. But this is not the whole of human life. Now I'm writing about how people love one another. And again I ask myself the same question, this time through the prism of love: who are we and what country we are living in. Love is what brings us into this world. I want to love people. Although it's increasingly hard to love them. And getting harder." ||||| -- I'll get down on my knees to beg you--please, find our Anna Sushko. She lived in our village. In Kozhushki. Her name is Anna Sushko. I'll tell you how she looked, and you'll type it up. She has a hump, and she was mute from birth. She lived by herself. She was sixty. During the time of the transfer they put her in an ambulance and drove her off somewhere. She never learned to read, so we never got any letters from her. The lonely and the sick were put in special places. They hid them. But no one knows where…. The whole village took care of her, like she was a little girl. 
 
 
 
 Unlike most recent Nobel Prize winners, Svetlana Alexievich writes simply and directly, without any tricks of style, and the emotion she distills is heartbreaking. For these words are not her own, but those of survivors of the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, faithfully transcribed by her down to the silences, tears, and hesitations, and lucidly translated by Keith Gessen. Start at the beginning, or open to any page, and you will find yourself drawn into these poor people's lives: townspeople who go out on their balconies to watch the unusual colors of the reactor fire, farmers forced to leave their crops and cattle, soldiers and firemen drafted in with inadequate protection to clean up the mess. It is very easy to read, and unbearably human. Or starkly human and eventually unbearable to read, because the stories of stolen lives are told in their raw form and never let up. 
 
 
 
 The book is framed by two longish sections headed "A Solitary Human Voice," the accounts of widows, newlyweds and very much in love, seeing their husbands come back and basically rot before their eyes. It continues with monologues, dialogues, choruses, the voices of soldiers, resettlers, children, all meticulously attributed with their real names. There is tragedy, of course, and even more pathos. One returning soldier burns all his clothing except for his army cap which is coveted by his little boy; two years later, the child is dead of a brain tumor. One woman smuggles out her radioactive cat in a suitcase. Another goes to see her doctor: 
 
 
 
 -- "Sweety," I say, "my legs don't move. The joints hurt." "You need to give up your cow, grandma. The milk's poisoned." "Oh, no," I say, "my legs hurt, my knees hurt, but I won't give up the cow. She feeds me." 
 
 
 
 There is rumor and superstition here, but much genuine faith; ignorance and a strange kind of poetry. Bewilderment is only the other side of the coin to a previous belief in the stability of the simple life; sorrow is the obverse of love. The light of the disaster illuminates the lives of ordinary people; I could well believe that this is a better portrait of the Russian soul than any number of novels. There are even touches of characteristic black humor: 
 
 
 
 -- There was a Ukrainian woman at the market selling big red apples. "Come get your apples! Chernobyl apples!" Someone told her not to advertise that, no one will buy them. "Don't worry," she says. "They buy them anyway. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their boss." 
 
 
 
 One man tried to write about his experiences. "I sent the story to a journal. They wrote back saying that this wasn't a work of literature, but the description of a nightmare." Which makes me ask the question of Alexievich herself: a nighmare certainly, but is this literature as we know it? It felt more like the raw materials waiting to be made into literature by someone else. Being a theatrical person myself, I kept on wondering how I might select from those monologues and choruses to put them on the stage, set them to music perhaps, at any rate do something to give them shape and overall meaning. The author divides her book into three major sections: The Land of the Dead, The Land of the Living, and Amazed by Sadness. But the texture of the narratives is much the same in each; there is no obvious structural arc, no particular reason why you should continue to subject yourself to such a succession of tales of woe. But perhaps I would be wrong to try to force these stories into a shape that has some meaning. They HAVE no meaning, no larger redemptive purpose. And that is her point. 
 
 
 
 Keith Gessen, the translator, opens with an introduction giving some of the facts and dates of the disaster. But with the exception of a brief preface, Alexievich herself does not. In her equally brief closing section, In Place of an Epilogue, she explains why, and also why she feels the subject is so urgent: because living in a country with 350 atomic bombs, the threat of nuclear holocaust is all too real. Let me end my review, therefore, with her own voice after reading so many others: 
 
 
 
 -- I often thought that the simple fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision. Why repeat the facts--they cover up our feelings. The development of these feelings, the spilling of these feelings past the facts, is what fascinated me. I try to find them, collect them, protect them. These people had already seen what for everyone else is still unknown. I felt like I was recording the future. ||||| Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Munro won the Man Booker International Prize for her entire body of work in 2009 
 
 Canadian author Alice Munro has won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature. 
 
 Making the announcement, Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, called her a "master of the contemporary short story". 
 
 The 82-year-old, whose books include Dear Life and Dance of the Happy Shades, is only the 13th woman to win the prize since its inception in 1901. 
 
 "I knew I was in the running, yes, but I never thought I would win," Munro told Canadian media. 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Alice Munro: "I would really hope that this would make people see the short story as an important art" 
 
 Presented by the Nobel Foundation, the award - which is presented to a living writer - is worth eight million kronor (£770,000). 
 
 Previous winners include literary giants such as Rudyard Kipling, Toni Morrison and Ernest Hemingway. 
 
 Mr Englund told The Associated Press that he had not been able to contact Munro ahead of the announcement so left a message on her answering machine, informing her of her win. 
 
 "She has taken an art form, the short story, which has tended to come a little bit in the shadow behind the novel, and she has cultivated it almost to perfection,'' he added. 
 
 Munro, who began writing in her teenage years, published her first story, The Dimensions of a Shadow, in 1950. 
 
 She had been studying English at the University of Western Ontario at the time. 
 
 Chekov 
 
 If she hadn't won it before she died, I think it would have been a terrible, terrible omission. Will Gompertz, BBC Arts editor 
 
 Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968, was Munro's first collection, and it went on to win Canada's highest literary prize, the Governor General's Award. 
 
 In 2009, she won the Man Booker International Prize for her entire body of work - but she downplayed her achievements. 
 
 "I think maybe I was successful in doing this because I didn't have any other talents," she once said in an interview with Book Lounge. 
 
 BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz said Munro had been "at the very top of her game since she started". 
 
 "Very few writers are her equal," he said, adding "she gets to the heart of what it is to be human". 
 
 "I thought she might not win because she's not overtly political; and of late the Nobel has tended to go to political writers." 
 
 The award "probably won't make a commercial difference" to the author, he added, but it "makes a huge difference to how her work will be viewed in historical terms". 
 
 "If she hadn't won it before she died, I think it would have been a terrible, terrible omission." 
 
 Often compared to Anton Chekhov, she is known for writing about the human spirit and a regular theme of her work is the dilemma faced by young girls growing up and coming to terms with living in a small town. 
 
 The Nobel academy praised her "finely tuned storytelling, which is characterised by clarity and psychological realism". 
 
 'Pipe dreams' 
 
 Munro, whose daughter woke her to tell her she had won the Nobel, said she was "terribly surprised" and "delighted". 
 
 Speaking to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), she said she always viewed her chances of winning as "one of those pipe dreams" that "might happen, but it probably wouldn't". 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Will Gompertz on the winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature Alice Munro 
 
 "It's the middle of the night here and I had forgotten about it all, of course," she added. 
 
 Since the 1960s, Munro has published more than a dozen collections of short stories, many of which take place in her native southwest Ontario. 
 
 Her writing has brought her several awards. She won The Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the National Book Critics Circle prize for Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, and is a three-time winner of the Governor General's prize. 
 
 Other notable books include Lives of Girls and Women, Who Do You Think You Are, The Progress of Love and Runaway. 
 
 In 1980, The Beggar Maid was shortlisted for the annual Booker Prize for Fiction and her stories frequently appear in publications such as the New Yorker and the Paris Review. 
 
 Retirement 
 
 Several of her stories have also been adapted for the screen, including The Bear Came Over the Mountain, which became Away from Her, starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent. 
 
 Munro revealed earlier this year that her latest book, Dear Life, published in 2012, would be her last. 
 
 "Perhaps, when you're my age, you don't wish to be alone as much as a writer has to be," she told Canada's National Post. 
 
 In 2009, Munro revealed she had been receiving treatment for cancer. She also had bypass surgery for a heart condition. 
 
 Notoriously publicity-shy, Munro shies away from public events. 
 
 According to American literary critic David Homel: "She is not a socialite. She is actually rarely seen in public, and does not go on book tours. 
 
 Munro will be presented with her latest award at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, who established the prize. 
 
 Last year's recipient was Chinese novelist Mo Yan.
– A Belarus writer known for what Swedish Academy judges called "her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time," won the Nobel Prize for Literature Thursday, the Guardian reports. Svetlana Alexievich, 67, has made her name by instilling a journalistic style heavy on eyewitness accounts into literature that focuses on the "great tragedies of the Soviet Union and its collapse," including Chernobyl and the Soviet war in Afghanistan, per the AP, as well as her own website. Her first novel, War's Unwomanly Face, which documented the untold stories of multitudes of women who fought against the Nazis, was published in 1985 and sold more than 2 million copies. Also under Alexievich's belt: three plays and the screenplays for nearly two dozen documentaries. Alexievich, born in 1948 to a Belarus father and Ukrainian mother in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankivsk, is the 14th woman to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, per the Guardian; Alice Munro was the last female to nab the honors in 2013. Alexievich explains her approach to writing on her site, noting that she'd been "searching for a genre that would be most adequate to my vision of the world to convey how my ear hears and my eyes see life. … Finally I chose a genre where human voices speak for themselves." One of her books, Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, involved hundreds of interviews with people affected by the 1986 nuclear meltdown, NPR notes. "I usually spend three to four years writing a book, but this time it took me more than 10 years," Alexievich told the Dalkey Archive Press. The Nobels continue Friday with the Peace Prize.