Non-fiction writer wins Nobel Prize for Literature (2015)

article by Ron Charles (Wash. Post Book World):

Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich has won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature for her work, which the Swedish Academy described as “a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”
The Nobel committee rarely chooses nonfiction writers for the literature prize. Alexievich is the author of, among other books, “Voices from Chernobyl,” about the survivors of the nuclear plant disaster in Ukraine in 1986.
The permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, made the announcement this morning in Stockholm.
In a televised interview immediately afterwards, Danius called Alexievich “an extraodinary writer. . . . She’s actually devised a new genre, a new kind of literary genre.”
The Nobel secretary went on to say, “For the past 30 or 40 years, [Alexievich] has been busy mapping the Soviet and post-Soviet individual. 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 that’s she’s sort of covering in her various [ways] — the Chernobyl disaster, the Soviet war in Afghanistan and so on — these are, in a way, just pretext 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 a human being about whom we don’t really know that much. . . . And at the same time, she’s offering us a history of emotions, a history of the soul.”

When Alexievich got the call that she had won the Nobel Prize, she reportedly exclaimed, “Fantastic!”
Danius said her favorite book by Alexievich is “War’s Unwomanly Face” about the female soldiers in WWII.

The Nobel Prize is worth about $960,000.