SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: There is an opinion, after so many years, that we know everything there is to know about Chernobyl: that it’s a thing of the past, and that nobody wants to hear about it anymore. 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." I try to find them, collect them, protect them. Or starkly human and eventually unbearable to read, because the stories of stolen lives are told in their raw form and never let up. “It takes me a long time to write my books, from five to 10 years. 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”. “It immediately evokes such great names as [Ivan] Bunin, [Boris] Pasternak,” she said, referring to Russian writers who have won the prize. 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. Alexiyevich's book have been published in many countries: USA, Germany, UK, Japan, Sweden, France, China, Vietnam, Bulgaria, India -- 19 countries in all. 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. 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. “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. She never learned to read, so we never got any letters from her. The development of these feelings, the spilling of these feelings past the facts, is what fascinated me. Fear is a large part of our lives—more, even, than love. They live as it were after the third world war, after a nuclear war. 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.
– 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.