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'Voices From Chernobyl' Author Svetlana Alexievich Wins Lit Nobel (theguardian.com)
Lawrence Bottorff writes: The author of Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, Svetlana Alexievich, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. It's somewhat surprising, since she is an investigative journalist and not a fiction writer/novelist. And yet her "novels in voices" style, as the Nobel jurists believe, clearly has a literary impact. Here's what a review from the Journal of Nuclear Medicine says about Voices from Chernobyl:
"Alexievich was a journalist living in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, at the time of the Chernobyl accident. Instead of choosing the usual approach of trying to quantify a disaster in terms of losses and displacement, the author chose instead to interview more than 500 eyewitnesses over a span of 10 years. ... It tells us about the psychologic and personal tragedy of the modern-day nuclear disaster. It is about the experiences of individuals and how the disaster affected their lives."
Although the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded based on "lifetime work" rather than an individual book, Voices... is her best-known and most celebrated work.
"Alexievich was a journalist living in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, at the time of the Chernobyl accident. Instead of choosing the usual approach of trying to quantify a disaster in terms of losses and displacement, the author chose instead to interview more than 500 eyewitnesses over a span of 10 years. ... It tells us about the psychologic and personal tragedy of the modern-day nuclear disaster. It is about the experiences of individuals and how the disaster affected their lives."
Although the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded based on "lifetime work" rather than an individual book, Voices... is her best-known and most celebrated work.
Do you notice how her books lack stories like this:
My family lived 25 kilometers from Chernobyl in a small village, my husband worked on a small furniture factory and I worked as a teacher. Several days after the explosion, soldiers came to us and told that we'll have to relocate soon. We were allowed to take only small personal items and all of them were inspected.
We were offered a new apartment in Ryazan' and received several thousand rubles, enough to buy new furniture. We also got cards to buy imported Bulgarian child food for our 6-months old son. Even after the USSR collapse we received free medical checkups every year and our son got free admission into a top Russian university. He's working as a nuclear engineer in Bryanks now.
A true story, I worked with their son. But of course, this story is not sufficiently full of bullcrap to win a Nobel.