Svetlana Alexievich

Alexievich trained as a journalist in Minsk and worked as a teacher and provincial newspaper reporter before she found the form that became her life's work: transcribing hundreds of interviews into a single choral novel of voices. Her first book, an oral history of Soviet women who served in the Second World War, unsettled censors uneasy with its unheroic view of combat and was held up for years before finally appearing. She followed it with interviews of Chernobyl survivors and the mothers of soldiers killed in Afghanistan, spending years on each book gathering testimony no official history recorded.

Secondhand Time, her account of the Soviet collapse assembled from ordinary Russians' grief and disorientation, won her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, the first ever awarded to a work built from documentary interviews. Belarus under Lukashenko had already made her position difficult for a decade; she spent years in exile in Paris, Berlin, and Gothenburg under literary-asylum programs before returning home. She was driven abroad again after publicly backing the 2020 protests against Lukashenko's disputed election.