Non-fiction writer wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian author, received the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature on Oct. 8, becoming the 14^th woman to win a prize that has been awarded 107 times. Alexievich received it “for her polyphonic writin
gs, a monument to suffering and courage in our time,” according to Nobel Prize’s official website.

According to an in-depth feature by Ron Charles of washingtonpost.com, “The Nobel committee rarely chooses nonfiction writers for the literature prize. Alexievich, 67, is the author of, among other books, ‘Voices From Chernobyl,’ about survivors of the nuclear plant disaster in Ukraine in 1986. She has also been a forceful critic of Russian military action and of President Vladimir Putin.”

Awarding the prize to Alexievich “is a bold decision,” according to the headline from The Independent. It was also a “brilliant choice that recalibrates the status of ‘non-fiction’ in the literary canon,” Arifa Akbar writes in the op-ed.

Alexievich was born May 31, 1948 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine.

The Los Angeles Times has seven reasons why the prize went to a Belarusian you don’t know. The last American to win the award was Toni Morrison in 1993. No. 1 on the Times list? “American literature is ‘too isolated, too insular.” Carolyn Kelley, writing for the Times, explains: “In 2008, then-Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl made headlines when he declared American literary culture "too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature." That year, the award went to French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, a writer with virtually no public profile in the United States.” 

The Nobel Prize for Literature was first awarded in 1901. Winners from the last 10 years include Patrick Modiano of France (2014), Alice Munro of Canada (2013), Mo Yan of China (2012), Thomas Transtromer of Sweden (2011), Mario Vargas Liosa of Peru/Spain (2010), Romanian-born Herta Muller of Germany (2009), J.M.G Le Clezio of France/Mauritius (2008), Persian-born Doris Lessing of the United Kingdom (2007), Orhan Pamuk of Turkey (2006), and Harold Pinter of the United Kingdom (2005).