Svetlana Alexievich

Born

1948-05-31

Birthplace

Galich, Ivano-Frankovskaya oblast, USSR (Ukraine)

Biography

Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich is a Belarusian investigative journalist and non-fiction prose writer. Her father is Belarusian and her mother is Ukrainian. After her father’s demobilisation from the army, the family returned to his native Belarus 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 went on to have a career in journalism and has written short stories and reportage, in which she’s covered the Chornobyl catastrophe, the Soviet war in Afghanistan and many other events – all based on thousands of interviews of witnesses. Svetlana received Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015.