Belarusian Svyatlana Aleksiyevich has received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The writer got the prize for her ‘polyphonic prose that is a monument to suffering and bravery in our time’, a representative of the Nobel Prize committee said announcing the laureate.
The news has drawn a wide response in Western mass media.
Aleksiyevich is the 14th woman to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, British The Guardian notes.
The newspaper has interviewed Belarusian politician Andrei Sannikau. He was thrilled to hear that his compatriot had received the prize, he claimed:
“I have been nervous since yesterday evening. Although her victory was predicted by bookmakers, one cannot know it for sure. I am so happy. She does deserve this award. She is a great person, a thoughtful, deep and interesting interlocutor and she is very sincere.”
This is the first Nobel Prize for Belarus, the Russian BBC service reports.
The Independent also wrote about the Belarusian writer. “She has developed a new kind of literary genre based on real interviews and she was heavily influenced by her fellow Belarusian writer Ales Adamovich,” the edition notes.
Spanish El Pais described the writer’s life and noted her criticism of the current Belarusian regime. She is living abreaod (in Germany) more than at home and her last book was a great success there.
French Le Figaro has published extracts from the writer’s earlier interview. Aleksiyevich said that she was a captive of journalism but did not want to call her works journalism. She calls them ‘a novel of voices’.
The American portal CNN has published a big article about Svyatlana Aleksiyevich including her biography and the writer’s own description of her work:
"I'm writing a history of human feelings. What people thought, understood and remembered during the event. What they believed in or mistrusted, what illusions, hopes and fears they experienced. This is impossible to imagine or invent, at any rate in such multitude of real details."
In the United States, Ms. Alexiyevich is best known for the oral history Voices From Chernobyl translated by writer Keith Gessen, The New York Times reports. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The tags #Alexievich are topping Twitter now. 100 twits were getting updated every 30 seconds in the past 18 hours.
